Remember that a mechanism similar to weights is used in UNIX/Linux init scripts (each daemon is given a 3 digit number and they are started in order).
How many people actually use that? I've never even seen such a 3 digit number in Gentoo. (I believe there is a dependency system or something, I don't ever need to look at it.)
All UNIX like systems that use the sysvinit (System V Initialization) use this. This is on UNIX V.4, Solaris, Red Hat, Mandriva, Ubuntu ...etc. # cd /etc/rc3.d/ # ls S10sysklogd S19mysql-ndb-mgm S20mysql S20ssh S25mdadm S89cron S99rc.local S11klogd S20makedev S20postfix S21mysql-ndb S50proftpd S91apache2 S99rmnologin These are just symlinks to the real script that does the start and stop which is in /etc/init.d/ for each service.
This is similar to update-rc.d in Debian/Ubuntu.
Never used it, I'm going to guess a majority of Drupal administrators haven't either.
That does not mean it is not there, just that you did not come across it. On Debian/Ubuntu, it is the update-rc.d that does it. http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Update-rc.d On Redhat and family there is chkconfig. http://www.netadmintools.com/art94.html There is always the manual way as well: ln -s /etc/init.d/somedaemon /etc/rc3.d/S42somedaemon I am not saying this is the best or worst way, but the concept is used elsewhere.