I thought I'd toss in yet another idea (or rather an experimental
implementation of some idea I've seen suring the course of this
discussion).

How about this, two dirs, one for executables, and one for config
info.  The files in these dirs are named as the packages.

$bin		keeps the start/stop/reconfig binaries/scripts

$conf		holds a configuration script containing *one*
		comment matching the RE:
		^#[ +t]*require[ \t](.*)
		where the parenthesis part should hold other pkg-names
		this package depends upon

$bin could be /sbin, /sbin/init.d, /etc/init.d, /etc/sysconf whatever
$conf could be /etc/pkg or whatever

Now I put together this scipt, I call pkg-run, that takes an argument
"start" or "stop".  It'll parse the require lines and make a partial
order and run the package's scripts in either forward or reverse order
depending on if we start or stop.  It will also source the config
script before running the package's scripts.  This way a config file
might look like:

# require nfs dns
LIBDIR=/usr/local/lib/foo; export LIBDIR

So what do you think?  This is just the base of discussion of course.
Things that could be added are to not start/stop already
started/stopped packages.  To not start dependant packages if failure
occurs, likewise for stop, etc.  It's just a five-minute script so
don't be too hard on me :-)

Niklas

#!/bin/sh
# pkg-run

conf=/tmp/pkg
bin=/tmp/sbin

usage ()
{
  echo "usage: $0 [start|stop]" >&2
  exit 1
}

if [ $# != 1 ]; then
  usage
fi

cmd=$1

case $cmd in
  start)
    reverse=no
    ;;
  stop)
    reverse=yes
    ;;
  *)
    usage
    ;;
esac

cd $conf
for pkg in *; do
  require=`sed -n 's/^#[ 	]*require[ 	]//p' $pkg`
  if [ "X$require" = X ]; then
    echo $pkg $pkg
  else
    for req in $require; do
      if [ X$reverse = Xyes ]; then
	echo $pkg $req
      else
	echo $req $pkg
      fi
    done
  fi
done |tsort |while read pkg; do
  (. $conf/$pkg; $bin/$pkg $cmd)
done