s6 vs shell wrappers for client connections

["artur.brzozowski" <artur.brzozowski@protonmail.com>]

Hi.

I'm wondering if and how s6 can help with the following
user-oriented problem:

You have a program that can be started normally or as a service
that accepts connections through a socket. For client
connections, an additional binary is supplied.

The simplest way to make sure that the program launches
regardless of whether there's a server running or not is a
wrapper script that executes the right binary based on socket's
availability.

Example of this is the 'foot' terminal emulator - it has 'foot
[--server]' and footclient binaries.  How, if at all, could s6
help remove this executable ambiguity, the need for checking and
wrapping? The goal is to always run the program correctly: if
server is available, connect to it with client binary, if not -
use the standard one.

In a not-so-old issue thread [1] I read:
>
> User: st3r4g
> For example, with s6-rc you would have a foot server service
> running foot -s -p 3 and have notification-fd set to 3 in the
> service directory. Then you can have e.g. footclient irssi
> depend on the foot server service, and they will all be started
> in the correct order, as soon as possible.
>
> User: dnkl
> The --print-pid option was designed with s6 in mind ;)

To continue with the example: I set up 'foot' as described above.
The result is that s6-svscan/supervise starts the 'foot' server,
places an 'S' socket in the service directory and sits there.  I
can connect to the server by pointing to socket in service
directory
$ footclient -s "$s6-foot-servdir/S"

This however, still requires me to check for the socket and
if-else the binary and options each time I want to start the
program, doesn't it? Does s6 offer a remedy?

Any pointers, even to the correct man page for this, would be
appreciated.

Best wishes,
Artur

[0] https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
[1] https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/issues/604#issuecomment-267617