In message <199507281156.GAA27611@solutions.solon.com>, Peter Seebach writes:
> 
> Perhaps a saner mechanism would allow for named, rather than numeric,
> run levels.  's' is already a non-numeric, so we already have arbitrary
> character support (in theory).  Perhaps we should allow the names to
> be strings not containing a colon, separated by pipes, so:
> state:s|single-user|single:[blah blah blah]
> would appear in some file.
> /etc/initcap
> 

Hmm, I don't understand why you would want to have another file in /etc.
Why not do something like this:

If /etc/rc is a file, use it in the normal way.  No problems, the BSD dudes
are satisfied.  If /etc/rc is a directory, execute /etc/rc/init with any
unknown arguments that got passed to init.  The bootblocks and kernel might
have to change some for this to work...

/etc/rc/init can then do whatever it feels like, the 'run-levels' could be
in /etc/rc/* (any name, not just [0-xSs]).

Basically, init still has two states.  Single and multi.  The single-user
state is basically, OS and a shell.  The multi-user is OS + startup scripts.
The state-machine for moving between states can then be implemented by
shutdown.  The only state transition that init really has to be involved
in, is from multi-user to single-user.  Basically, shutdown would invoke
all the apropriate scripts, and then tell init to go single user, which
would do as it has always done, killing off unneeded processes.

I'm babling again.  Most of the above is likely not even coherent, but I
hope that it provides some ideas to other people...

--Toby.
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