something that was not necessary. Init scripts can be nice and clean [1]. And yes, I'm all for a init replacement. Something new, nice and clean. But I take the shell script hackery over a dbus dependency. But that's just my personal opinion.
I have neither used it nor looked at the code, but [2] seems to be what I want. It's by the libdietc author, so i expect the code to be small, elegant and not maintained very well.
[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/rc-scripting/rcng-dum...