All, I removed virtual/daemontools from virtual/init because it doesn't appear to be an init process; it is just a service manager. Here is a list of the rdepends in my proposed virtual/init with comments. kernel_linux? ( || ( sys-apps/sysvinit # If I add an RDEPEND to sysvinit for sys-apps/openrc and remove # the rdepend on sysvinit from sys-apps/openrc, it will line up # sys-apps/sysvinit with the other inits below. # See below for why it is important that this one is first in # RDEPEND. sys-apps/systemd # This blocks sysvinit if the sysvinit-utils use flag is on, # which it is by default. # If you turn off the use flag, you get the same arrangement # you have with openrc right now. sys-apps/openrc # If I add a sysvinit-utils use flag here, but do *NOT* # force it on, it wouldn't remove sysvinit, so they could # co-exist and you would have to switch via the boot loader. # In fact, they already do co-exist. you have openrc-init # and openrc-shutdown on your system if you have openrc # installed. sys-process/runit # This one has an rdepend on openrc because it uses # openrc in its boot sequence even if you don't use it as # pid 1. # If you are not planning to use runit as pid 1, you would # need to set up the init you want to use with it (upstream # runit doesn't care which one you use, so I don't think I # should either) to stay around by # using something like: # emerge --noreplace init-app # to add it to the world file. ) ) kernel_FreeBSD? ( sys-freebsd/freebsd-bin ) Another reason for virtual/init is, if I drop the sys-apps/sysvinit rdepend from sys-apps/openrc, sysvinit will not be installed by default any longer, so I would want to add this virtual to the base profile with sysvinit listed first to make sure nothing is broken. Mike, I don't see how this would conflict with systemd.