Just for the purpose of looking at code and getting some clues as to how things function, I decided to check out ol' sysvinit's repository on
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit and while meddling around reading code, I was shocked to see development still ongoing for 2.89dsf's release.
It looks like some of the last commits were over 3-6 months ago. Looks like ol' sysvinit is still alive, and apparently still breathing.