I hacked in a force_foreground option into gmond 2.5.0, which essentially just insures that the daemon_init() function never gets called.. regardless of the debug level.
I use this with D.J. Bernsteins supervise tool, in his daemontools package at http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html. It does the job and makes it really easy to start and restart gmond, gmetad, etc. I'd like to suggest having this force_foreground type feature future versions. I call gmond with the -F option now. The apache httpd daemon has been modified by some people to offer something similar, but it doesn't seem to be in the stock distribution. I hope ganglia sets a positive trend here :)
