> (I believe commercial Unixes like Solaris also moved to dependency-based init in the 2000s). You are correct. Solaris 10 introduced SMF (http://docs.oracle.c

> (I believe commercial Unixes like Solaris also moved to dependency-based init in the 2000s). You are correct. Solaris 10 introduced SMF (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1451/dzhid.html#scrolltoc http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1451/dzhid.html...), which kicks quite a bit of ass. Services are defined in XML files called manifests, which specify dependencies (including filesystems and network connectivity), the user and group to run as, timeouts for start/stop, and a bunch of other stuff. The cool part is that, while the manifest files are static, SMF doesn't actually use them directly. The service definitions get slurped into a DB, and you can change properties (such as the whether or not the service is enabled, the user to run as, and pretty much anything else the manifest author thought of) on the fly, without editing a manifest or mucking with symlinks. SMF also starts services in parallel (Solaris/OpenSolaris boot really, really quickly), and services that die are automatically restarted (so long as they're dying again too quickly).