One of the reasons I raised this point is that, today, modules are wildly inconsistent about fataling. If the nssock module fails to load or to listen, the server continues, ever hopeful; if the nscp module fails, on the other hand, it's going down and it's not going alone! Between the two, I can generally tolerate a failure to load nscp far better than a failure in nssock, but there's no mechanism for handling this sort of thing.
I suppose I'd like some kind of module load exception handler, the default for which shuts down the server. As for database drivers, I think it's never acceptable for a driver to fatal because of a failed connection -- there's already a well-established mechanism to report and detect connection failures at the time of a "ns_db gethandle", and if that fails, you can exit yourself; if you want to make sure you can connect to the DB at startup, do a gethandle and exit if it fails; no reason to have the module issue the fatal, especially because there may be cleanup required before the process terminates.
