As per summary, the new start-stop-daemon command in baselayout 2 is not compatible with the --startas option, so they won't work with it (and I'm running it on Farragut, where I need memcached for gitarella). I have no idea how to get it to work otherwise :) Thanks, Diego
--exec should be used in place of --startas. They are effectively the same option.
I can confirm a s/startas/exec/ worked flawlessy.
alpha3 has restored --startas for the time being