Daemons restart or reload configuration files
Restarting or reloading daemons currently use /etc/init.d/daemon_name. On Debian (and Ubuntu), for a long time, using "invoke-rc.d" (ex.: "invoke-rc.d daemon_name restart") had been recommended, and now, yet another method is on Ubuntu because of upstart (ex.: "service daemon_name restart"). Anyway, I'm a user of Nexenta (OpenSolaris kernel with Debian GNU userland), which uses yet another slightly different one (ex.: "svcadm restart daemon_name").
So I propose to introduce a generic system, with parameters $service (= daemon name) and $action (=restart|reload, I guess nothing else is really needed for now).
Syntax should be dependent upon the system it is running on /etc/init.d/, invoke-rc.d, service or svcadm. Please also note that the order of the (two) arguments do change in some of those. Something to catch the return code should also be available there.