initscript "feature" questions

[Jon Masters]

Yo,

Why do we do this in /etc/rc:

# First, run the KILL scripts.
for i in /etc/rc$runlevel.d/K* ; do
        check_runlevel "$i" || continue

        # Check if the subsystem is already up.
        subsys=${i#/etc/rc$runlevel.d/K??}
        [ -f /var/lock/subsys/$subsys -o
-f /var/lock/subsys/$subsys.init ] \
                || continue

        # Bring the subsystem down.
        if LC_ALL=C egrep -q "^..*init.d/functions" $i ; then
                $i stop
        else
                action $"Stopping $subsys: " $i stop
        fi
done

Specifically, why is there the broken assumption that everything must
relate to a daemon (which is now called a subsystem), and that this must
be first running with a lock file before the killscript can run?

On several other $random distributions, I don't have this getting in the
way of me running designated actions on shutdown, and I'd love to know
why it's done this way in Fedora - is this standards compliance or
simply a bug? I'm not criticising, but this wasted time with a number of
unneeded reboots before I went looking for why :-)

Jon.