> I think adding a mechanism to run shutdown scripts at a sensible point
> during shutdown, before init kills user-level processes, sounds like a
> good idea.  That should also address one well-made point that came up
> in the last iteration: namely, starting up and shutting down database
> systems.

Done.  The firsting I run in /etc/shutdown.d is maxrun.sh which time
aborts the shutdown.d/* after some decent time - so the machine does
not hang forever...

> To emphasise the point: yes, by all means, clean up and modularize the
> startup process. And add a clean mechanism for running a script when
> going from multi-user to single-user.  But runlevels?
> I thought we buried that one last time!

I don't think anyone mentioned runlevels this time, and yes as you
say, you can very easily have start/stop scripts without runlevels and
you can even have them as well as /etc/rc.local.  Eg. at end of
rc.local:

#
# Local additions...
#
if [ -x /etc/rc_local.sh ]; then
        /etc/rc_local.sh
fi



--sjg