Personally I've found make incredibly useful as an init system (though it takes a static make in /bin). I have targets like mount_a, %.start, %.stop (those both

Personally I've found make incredibly useful as an init system (though it takes a static make in /bin). I have targets like mount_a, %.start, %.stop (those both turned out to be overkill so I just wrote the start/stop targets by hand, but it works fine), halt, etc. Works great, is very lightweight, does away with the antiquated idea of integral runlevels, and is very easy to debug. Plus you can probably set it up in a single afternoon and then just boot with init="/bin/make -f /etc/init.mk multi_user".