I've used it just a bit. AFAICT Shepherd is a fairly minimal dependency graph. It's not comprehensive - in Guix there are services that exist above and below

I've used it just a bit. AFAICT Shepherd is a fairly minimal dependency graph. It's not comprehensive - in Guix there are services that exist above and below Shepherd and you can't define ordering dependencies between these (ex: a shepherd service can't depend on a mount (above shepherd), or an inetd service (below shepherd) on a database). I'm not sure that's a huge problem in practice. Shepherd process stdout/stderr are sent to syslog. Shepherd automatically restarts services if they fail but not forever, and the retry behavior isn't configurable ATM.