<hr /><i>steveb added on 2011-07-22 07:22:33 UTC:</i><br />
Looks to me like you missed a parameter in your inetd line.
Look carefully at the example at http://www.sqlite.org/debug1/doc/tip/www/quickstart.wiki

  80 stream tcp nowait.1000 root /usr/bin/fossil /usr/bin/fossil http /home/proj1/repos1.fossil

Note that /usr/bin/fossil is listed twice. The first time is the command to execute and the second is argv[0] passed to the program. They will often be the same, as in this example.