Ugh, I'd still rather recode /sbin/preinit personally (reasons mentioned elsewhere, plus the principle of the thing), but I suppose working with you guys on this one will get me more experienced with its workings to the point where I can validly say I can 'clone' it without directly copying.

ANYWAY - rambling aside... I'm happy to jump on to pali's /sbin/preinit for development purposes, although I would love if it still let users start a root shell at the earliest moment possible, like mine more or less does now. I kinda like the idea of an internalized menu, but I am weary of feature bloat. /sbin/preinit is horribly delicate, so the more complex it gets the more likely it'll be that one missed error will screw up the boot process, etc. So we MAY want, if we're going to add a menu fancier than to add the extra functions in separate scripts, which are only called from within /sbin/prenit, and only AFTER some user-generated action.

(I suspect people won't want to, in the long run, to add the fbcon loading and shell prompt where I have it in my version, within init_system(), so I won't push for that too much myself unless enough other people think having such an extremely-early fallback is a good idea.)