i develop shed, which is simpler as it is written in posix shell, it does some simple and rudimentary implementation of XDG_RUNTIME_DIR management, service files are just simple key=val files, it has multiple shortcomings as of right now as in spite of some users being interested and even using shed i'm the sole developer.

shed is intended to eventually provide the expected functionality of what debian defines as "x-session-manager" however at the time it does not and needs to be started before the window manager in the xsession, at the moment the design considers only x11 but eventually it aims to be agnostic to the session type so it can be used for tty sessions, x11 sessions, wayland sessions and even ssh sessions, it implements exactly 0 dbus anything.

if anyone is curious here's the repo https://git.devuan.org/eylles/shed it has gathered very low traction specially here on the devuan forums

That's really neat and I hadn't heard of it before now, thanks for sharing.

I'm also delighted to see turnstile being included, though I only ever tried it once on Void Linux where it was buggy in desktop environments (I assume because it doesnt cover all of the login1 dbus stuff yet).

In my experience the packaged turnstile daemon is quite stable and safe. The package default backend, despite its name "suss", also works quite well. (I haven't explored the other backends) It provides a reliable "user service" process control including both one-shot actions and session-based services.

The expected "normal" use is straight-foward. A user that wants many services with start-up inter-dependencies may of course need to design that start-up somewhat carefully.

In short: a good option.

shed is intended to eventually provide the expected functionality of what debian defines as "x-session-manager" however at the time it does not and needs to be started before the window manager in the xsession, at the moment the design considers only x11 but eventually it aims to be agnostic to the session type so it can be used for tty sessions, x11 sessions, wayland sessions and even ssh sessions, it implements exactly 0 dbus anything.

if anyone is curious here's the repo https://git.devuan.org/eylles/shed it has gathered very low traction specially here on the devuan forums

I read your post as if you knew about something particular.

Refering to source would best be https://git.devuan.org/devuan/turnstile as it then would include patches and packaging deployed for the Devuan (and proposed Debian) package.
(Done by Mark Hindley and myself)

_https://github.com/chimera-linux/turnstile

Turnstile is a work in progress effort to create a session/login tracker to serve as a fully featured alternative to the logind subproject from systemd, and to provide a neutral API to both our session tracker and to logind itself.

What do you think "work in progress" means in this context?

It’s not entirely without problems:
_https://github.com/chimera-linux/turnstile/issues