I'm wondering if anyone knows of work being done to make sysvinit capable of logging the output of the rc scripts? HP-UX does this very nicely, such that instead of seeing what the script writes on stdout you get a curses-style table of scripts and their results, e.g.
Starting NIS server ................ OK Starting NFS server ................ *FAIL* I don't really think it's worth having as fancy a display as HP-UX does, since I wouldn't want my boot sequence to fail just because curses or slang or whatever broke, but you could get almost as nice a readout without. And you could still have the script output written to rc.log, which is what I'm really looking for.