SysVinit - apparently it’s necessary

I recently attempted a world update on my Gentoo system. This involves checking every program you’ve installed for a potential new release and installing it if available. There’s a way to do this quickly and painlessly with Gentoo (praise the Lord for Portage):
# emerge -pu world

Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) tells you whether a package is already installed, missing, needs to be upgraded, or is blocked by another package. The natural understanding of dependencies is wonderful and has helped me a number of times.

When I last attempted a world update I was told that SysVinit was blocking a program I was trying to install. Not knowing quite what it was I figured I’d trade it for the new program. As soon as I completed the update I had lost the following commands:
# reboot
# shutdown
# restart
and I realized that I’d never learned an alternative way to shutdown my computer.

Moral of the story: Portage is great, SysVinit is necessary, you should install Gentoo.