Chris warms the cockles of my heart at first:

>>> And while we are at SVR4: I think some of the ideas there are worth
>>> taking a look at.  One is the inittab stuff, the other is the nsswitch.
>> 
>> I've been planning to implement a SysV style init and use it to replace
>> all the /etc/rc* stuff.  There are even some half-baked PD/freeware
>> implementations of init itself, so it's more a matter of writing up some
>> standard wrapper scripts and re-designing the start-up procedures.
> 
> It's not clear to me that having the full SysV inittab generality is really
> worthwhile ...  (I, personally, have always found the notion of having N
> different run levels annoying.  I also find that some of the things I've seen
> started from inittab, etc., are just too gross for words.)

[Mumbled "amen, brother"s are heard amongst the assembled NetBSD acolytes.]

However, the Borg begins to assimilate him and as champagne bubbles pop about
his head a la Opus the Penguin from "Bloom County"/"Outland":

> I do like the idea of having umpteen million scripts run at boot-time, a la
> SysV, though.

Please ... I beg you ... in the name of Joy, Fabry, McKusick, Karels, Leffler,
Bostic et al. ... do not inflict "You are in a maze of twisty ``rc'' files, all
alike" on us ... noooooo ...

Hey, let's make a change to the rc stuff ... cd to /etc/init.d ... move the
original to a backup name ... create new one ... now go track down all the hard
links in rc?.d to the original and rename them original_S##<something> ... now
let's make new hard links to the new init.d script ... BLEAUGH

Next somebody's gonna recommend something brilliant like the System V "init"
use of a named pipe in /etc (/etc/initpipe) so we can have a named pipe in the
filesystem and cause extremely common things that people do like "cd /etc ;
grep <something> *" to get wedged ...  

Just Say Know,

	- Greg

P.S. Or should I have said Keep It Simple, Stupid