I've been thinking about the way Spurge works, and how it should be debianised.  Do any of you have strong opinions as to whether services whose traffic is not great should

1. be launched from inetd or xinetd?
2. listen for themselves?
3. be able to do both, and the administrator can choose according to expected load?  This appears to combine the faults of both schemes.

Pros and cons:

• The process is constantly running with (2), and not with (1).  Then again, if you're only running [x]inetd in order to run one service, you're running one extra process all the time anyway.
• Configuration (by the user or the package) is far simpler with (2), especially because xinetd and inetd have different configuration file formats.
• with (2), the service has to be capable of handling simultaneous connections in-house, whereas this isn't necessary with (1).
• (1) has an extra dependency.

What are your thoughts?

I think bucktooth might be a vaguely comparable system to look at.  (It uses xinetd.)