The installations instructions for stuff like apache and netatalk says
they are supposed to be called from /etc/rc.  Why not call them from
/etc/rc.local?  To me, the later would make more sense since they are
machine-specific daemons/services as opposite to something that came with
netbsd from the box.  That said could it be that they want themt o start on
/etc/rc so to give them more time to initialize?