Comment Re: No trust (Score 1) 124
If you notice there are some similarities of inittab and a makefile.
What?
Look at the names and descriptions in the fields and the pre-tab makefile format for far more similarity.
But both of those things are actually used. So are the IDs, they actually have meaning. And the runlevels are part of dependency. You pass through runlevels on your way to other runlevels.
The ID's aren't used for dependency. The id in sun sysv is a hack based on things like telnetd and rlogin. Part of the plan was to have the action field reference the ids and a state which was not done. The idea was to have a make like dependency check based on the current state of what was running.
Had inittab been expanded slightly, the need for scripts for most things would have disappeared completely. Everything else would have ended up being like the traditional rc3.d/[SK]* scripts.