I dislike tools that claim to automatically generate your configuration for you. At Google, one of the worst abuses that anyone had to deal with was auto-generated configuration; a tool purported to deal with configuration for you, but really just blutrted a boilerplate mess into your directory, many of the properties and setting set by cargo-cult or overriding sane defaults with baked-in versions of the same. Facebook is proceeding down this path; There's a new tool that will do all of your service stuff for you! I look forward to what a boondoggle those services that use it will be.

There was a discussion I recently stumbled upon about init systems in containers. Many processes spawned lots of zombies! You need a full init! Well, no; If your process is forking new processes, it should probably wait for them. If it's forking other processes that fork other processes, and they're not cleaning up zombies when they're done, that is a bug in those processes. If all else fails, your root-level process should probably implement a simple init on it's own (a wait() on loop in the background, dumping wait objects into a LRU map that other processes can do an equivalent of waitpid() on). Or just run under bash.

I've used pleaserun a little in the past. When you're being quick and dirty and using fpm it fits into the workflow quite nicely. It can be a bit awkward if you're deploying things that need anything complex in their init script, like a bootstrap command or something, but if it's just a straight start|stop|restart it works quite well. It's probably not up to generating distro-guideline-compliant init scripts (and fpm obviously doesn't either for spec file) but so long as that's not the goal it's a useful tool.