This is a fourth beta release, with bugfixes and some significant feature additions compared to the previous release. In particular, the new features focus on the ability for user customisation of distribution-provided services.

In the absence of major bugs, the next release is expected to be 1.0.

Thanks to current sponsors: Paweł Zmarzły (pzmarzly), Wesley Moore (wezm), M. Herdiansyah (konimex), q66, saolof

New features:

• A logo for Dinit was contributed by Yakui420.
• Service descriptions can now include other files, via the meta-commands @include and @include-opt (useful for user customisation of services).
• Some settings, including "command" and "stop-command", may now be appended to (useful for user customisation of services).
• Added ability to restart process-based services only "on-failure" (Mobin Aydinfar).
• Service settings may span multiple lines, by "escaping" the line ending with a backslash (Carlos Eduardo).
• Default system-wide locations are used for user services, in addition to the user-specific directory: /etc/dinit.d/user, /usr/local/lib/dinit.d/user, and /usr/lib/dinit.d/user (realroot2185).
• "dinitctl add-dep" now takes "need" as a dependency type in place of "regular". The latter is still supported as an alias, for the time being (Locria Cyber).
• New "depends-on.d" and "depends-ms.d" service settings, as per "waits-for.d" but for other dependency types.
• New "soft-reboot" utility to force restarting system services without full reboot (Yukari Chiba). Note that this requires appropriately configured services. It is most likely to be useful in containers.

Changes:

• For service restart via "dinitctl restart", display both "stopped" and "started" status instead of only "started".
• For some service settings, where the current setting is not actually overwritten by "re-assigning" the setting, the documentation now suggests using ":" to separate the setting name and value (rather than "="). This has long been supported, but was not documented previously.

Fixes:

• shutdown utility correctly changes behaviour according to name (reboot, etc) when built with a name prefix (Mobin Aydinfar).
• fixes to control connection processing on error conditions (Mobin Aydinfar).
• fixed rare dinitctl hang after enabling a service (Mobin Aydinfar).
• fixed bug detecting invalid process id from pid file for "bgprocess" services.
• full ("int"-sized) exit status of processes now reported, on operating systems that support this (including FreeBSD, and excluding Linux).

Build fixes:

• Improvements to configure script, fixing some failure cases (Mobin Aydinfar).
• Fixes to meson build: build "poweroff" binary, install "poweroff", "reboot" and "halt" as symbolic links as per Makefile build (M. Herdiansyah, aka konimex).
• Fixed FreeBSD makefile-based build.

Various other changes:

• Reworked integration tests, CI improvements (Mobin Aydinfar), documentation improvements, FreeBSD integration (see contrib/) (Locria Cyber).