Gentoo and BSD-style init?

[krylon]

Hello everybody,

I am currently using Slackware 9.1 on my desktop machine, but I still got plenty of disk-space available, so I am toying around with other distros. Maybe I will switch my primary OS again, in the near future. =)
Among the systems I want to try out is gentoo.
In the recent months I've been playing a lot with the *BSD-systems, coming to like them very much for their elegant balance of simplicity and efficiency. This is why I like Slackware so much, too, it has got a BSD-style init that is very simple yet powerful to set up and maintain.

Now I would really like to give gentoo a try - in fact I will anyway -, but unlike many distros it sounds like one I might even choose as my primary OS. I consider myself a rather advanced user and I don't mind reading a lot, so gentoo should be somewhere in a region I like.
Yet, I see, gentoo relies on a SysV-style init by default, which as of now would be reason enough not to use it. SysV-init plainly sucks, IMHO, being more ugly than words can say.
On the other hand, since is gentoo is supposed to be about having choices, since you can easily recompile everything, I guess it should be possible to install a BSD-init on a gentoo system.

Has anyone tried something like this?
Can anyone point me to information on the subject?
Will installing a BSD-init be possible without practically building an LFS? (In that case I could as well start building a real LFS...)

Thank you very much,

Kind regards,

Benjamin

[zhenlin]

Nonsense. Gentoo doesn't use SysV-style init scripts. It isn't quite like BSD-style either.

They're quite interesting really... Read this:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/rc-scripts.xml

[krylon]

Well, as far as I understand the documentation, it still uses those nasty folders and symlinks to scripts controlling services.
Which I just find ugly. Adding "some_service=YES" to rc.conf is just way more convenient...
Or, as I do with Slackware, adding "/path/to/service" to /etc/rc.d/rc.RUNLEVEL rc.local
You know, I just find that creating symlinks in runlevel-folders really ugly, I would rather like to replace them with scripts... I don't like having to call a script to enable/disable system services...

Possibly, I'm the only one who wants to do this, but if gentoo is about having choices, I think it might be possible to use a different init-system. And BSD's init - in my humble opinion - is the best alternative available.
Of course, it's a matter of taste to some degree. And gentoo's init-system *does* look quite powerful, but it does not look like I'm going to like it a lot.
(In theory, once you got everything set up right, you don't need to worry about that any more - I haven't touched Slackware's config in quite some time...)

So I repeat my question - is it possible to replace gentoo's init for a BSD-style init?

Anyway, I'm going to give gentoo a try. It sounds - all in all - like a very exciting distro... It also has other features I am used to from BSD-systems, like Portage and of course the option to recompile the entire system.
That kind of flexibility is quite what I am looking for and have not yet found in any Linux-distro I tried (so far: SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware).

Kind regards,

Benjamin