"Behind my back", a new feature was added to LSB specification and to Debian Lenny accordingly: Init scripts dependency.

The new LSB defines new fields for init script headers: Required, Should (like Required but only if installed) and Provides. This means that the init system should take care of ordering the init scripts according to their dependencies (i.e. "NFS" service requires "portmap" service which requires network and thus order should be Network -> Portmap -> NFS). This eliminates the need to give funny "K01/S99"-style numbers manually to each service.

Cool. But is it enough? The init system is several decades old. Maybe we need something revolutionary such as Upstart or Solaris SMF. Features like starting/stopping independent services in parallel, service monitoring (watchdog/keepalive), or other crazy ideas that Upstart & SMF implement.

Ubuntu's Upstart was adopted also by Fedora 9; this means that RHEL6 might use Upstart as well. In that case, the revolution is over.. Debian, SuSE (and Windows maybe? 🙂 ) would probably follow.