You could also argue that launchd, specifically, is a divorce from the UNIX way of doing things. init starts processes based on system events, xinetd starts pr

You could also argue that launchd, specifically, is a divorce from the UNIX way of doing things. init starts processes based on system events, xinetd starts processes based on network requests and cron starts processes based on time. launchd is a monolithic solution that is decidedly unUNIXy, however cool and attractive a centralized solution may be. It would be nice if these different programs had a common file format, but their file formats are reasonably optimized for the kinds of things they handling. One could stick a unified "edit process starting/stopping" GUI on top of init, cron, xinetd, etc and you'd end up with some of that attractiveness.