People are grumbling about this compatibility layer, and I might change/remove it at some point. The reason I still have not ripped it out is that I like the fact that your system will "just work" as before if you add init=/bin/systemd to the kernel command line. Without the compatibility layer you'd have to also enable the relevant services (I guess that's not too much to ask though...).
I think it's asking more than commenting out the DAEMONS line?
I assumed they were used a little, if they are unused why are they required, dependencies?
Not entirely sure what you are asking. systemd-tools used to be a dependency of initscripts (it is used all over the place), now systemd-tools was merged into systemd, so systemd is a dependency of initscripts. Does that answer your question?
Thanks yeah, rc.sysinit explains the rest -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) _______________________________________________________________________