I'm not even going to claim any expertise in this area. However, off the top of my head, I can see the following advantages to how Gentoo does the runlevel:
1) By adding 'softlevel' information to the grub settings, you can switch between runlevels at boot time instead of having to login, change '/etc/inittab' and then reboot. 2) By adding the dependency information to the init-scripts, you can run any init-script knowing that it will make sure everything needed for it is already running or started. 3) To change between runlevels, you just have to run all the scripts in a given '/etc/runlevels/<runlevel>' ... so, if you start in console mode and want to switch to xdm mode, just run the scripts in that runlevel directory via a simple shell script (ie: for i in `ls <runlevel-dir>; do $i start; done) ... (of course, there's probably an easier way to switch runlevels on gentoo, but again, I'm not an expert). As usual, these are just my thoughts... -Hani -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
