In OS X, the spawning of daemon and agent processes is handled by launchd, a remarkably powerful equivalent to systems such as init or systemd. While its adoption is almost entirely limited to OS X, launchd has in fact been open-sourced by Apple under the Apache 2 license, allowing projects such as openlaunchd to bring the technology to other platforms.
As extensive as it is, a major shortcoming in OS X's init system is its "minimalistic" management utilities. Simple tasks such as restarting a daemon, or enabling a new one, are made less convenient by the lack of a utility similar to /usr/bin/service or init.d scripts. There is the launchctl utility, however this leaves much to be desired in the way of workflow, and provides shell access only to a small portion a the functionality offered by launchd.
This project aims to take advantage of Apple's open sourcing launchd in order to rewrite launchctl as the powerful administrative tool it should have been, giving it the appropriately simple name "service." As a proof of concept, I have completed its first milestone; the service project now configures and builds entirely from source, yielding an actual, working twin of launchctl, ready to be modified in any way desired.