How should I start a daemon?

["Mark Wright" <mwright@pro-ns.net>]

I'm installing a new version of Postgresql.  The .deb available is only
v6.3, and I wan't to install the beta version, so I need to install it
myself.  I'm a little confused by how to perform automatic startup/shutdown
of the 'postmaster' daemon when the pc starts up or shuts down.  The
Postgresql documentation has this suggestion for Red Hat:
(in /etc/inittab)
pg:2345:respawn:/bin/su - postgres -c
"/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D/usr/local/pgsql/data >>
/usr/local/pgsql/server.log 2>&1 </dev/null"

But it seems that Debian has a complicated combination of scripts in init.d
and links in rcX.d.  Can anyone explain to me how I should set up my DBMS?

Mark.
---
Mark Wright
mwright@pro-ns.net
mark_wright@datacard.com