Automatically starting dependent services

[dan]

Issue #248 reversed a bug which I would actually have found useful to
remain in the code!

When a service is started, any dependent services are no longer started.
I can see that this is the correct behaviour most of the time.

However, we sometimes have "helper" services, hanging off a main
service, which everyone forgets about. They stop the main service with
the client "monit stop main-service", fix this or that, and turn the
main service back on again "monit start main-service" and forget that
the helpers would now be stopped.

In this case auto-starting of dependents would be great. I'm considering
writing a patch which adds syntax into the dependency line "with
autostart", or somesuch, which re-enables this propagation for those
dependencies.

Before I do so, is this a good idea? Is there some cunning method of
getting this behaviour already such that a patch is not required? Any
general guidelines for a newbie to the monit source for conditionally
reversing #248?

At the moment we have to restart all to make sure everything is running,
which isn't ideal as it's not symmetrical and maybe all slightly too
many services? Also alerts help, but not getting into an alerting
situation is better!

Thanks,
Dan.