After chatting with Rich a bit, I'm going to reply here.

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 08:17:17PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 8:03 PM William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 07:30:57PM -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> > > On 7/10/19 7:16 PM, William Hubbs wrote:
> > > > 3. add a sysvinit use flag to openrc, which will be off by default. When
> > > > it is on, openrc will block sysvinit since it will provide /sbin/init
> > > > and /sbin/shutdown.
> > > >
> > >
> > > This logic, or maybe the name of the flag, sounds backwards to me. I
> > > only get sysvinit when USE=sysvinit is NOT set?
> >
> > If you don't set sys-apps/openrc[sysvinit], you would have /sbin/init
> > and /sbin/shutdown as they are now, from sys-apps/sysvinit.
> >
> 
> Systemd already has IUSE=+sysv-utils which has a similar function:
> [-      ] sysv-utils
>     sys-apps/systemd: Install sysvinit compatibility symlinks and
>     manpages for init, telinit, halt, poweroff, reboot, runlevel, and
>     shutdown

Actually, I like the name sysv-utils for this use flag; that seems to
describe better what it does.

> RDEPEND="sysv-utils? ( !sys-apps/sysvinit )
>          !sysv-utils? ( sys-apps/sysvinit )"
 
 I like this, but the second branch (!sysv-utils) is not really needed,
 because if we put sysvinit as the first RDEPEND of virtual/init, we
 don't need to worry about installing it through rdepend in openrc. We
 can also add sys-apps/openrc as an rdepend of sys-apps/sysvinit
 possibly. I'll take a look at that.

> sysv-utils seems like a generic enough flag and I'd suggest that it
> would be appropriate to use for openrc as well if it can install its
> own implementation of these tools.

This is where I want to go. I don't want to install the openrc
implementations by default, because I want to make it easy to dual-boot
a system, like what systemd does by default if you don't have the
sysv-utils use flag turned on.

> 
> (For those who aren't aware, systemd is compatible with the sysvinit
> versions of these tools, so you can run systemd with sysvinit
> installed.)
> 
> -- 
> Rich
>