Annoyingly git-daemon-run requires runit on debian, but runit will fail to install properly in a debian vserver because it doesn't have init.
One solution is to reconfigure vserver to use plain init style.
However I didn't want to this because I don't want to take down my vserver just yet. So here is the required line for /etc/inetd.conf:
git stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/bin/git git daemon --inetd /var/git-repos
Cheers,
Steve