[belorn]

I mentioned it in the comment above. Commands that you run in a shell script do not always block execution until the underlying resources is fully available. If we take the network as an example, the script to open a vpn tunnel and providing the tap0 device may not be available for the next command to use just because you first run the network script, then start the vpn daemon, and then start the next daemon. What people did was to add a bunch of sleep(10) in hope that the tap0 was up by the end of the sleep, and this might had worked great for a few years until the admin added a few too many complex rules to the network daemon and now it need to be sleep(15) instead, but only on some days in the week. Everyone also knew (and ignored) that adding sleep in the initscript was a sign of bad design and extremely brittleness.

Debian did have a fairly good init builder that attempted to do some form of dependency ordering and trickery to get things done in the right order and in the right time, where you wrote a service-like configuration file and than rebuilt the initscript. The builder then compiled the configuration files into an generated shell script. Redhat did something similar if I recall right.

Manually editing the generated shell script was seen as both dodgy, brittle and dangerous given that it could be arbitrary changed by any installed package. Some packages also sed and awk directly at the generated init script.

[bandrami]

I'm curious about this world people seem to have lived in where inetd didn't exist.