How to run roscore as a daemon

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Since virtually everything in ROS seems to require roscore to be running, and there should only be one instance of it per machine, does it make sense to run it as a daemon/service process on Ubuntu and make it start at boot time? If so, why is this not the default configuration? Googling shows a few people have non-standard solutions for accomplishing this, but nothing in the roscore wiki suggests this is even desirable.

I feel this may be confusing a lot of newcomers, like myself, since most of the tutorials don't mention you need to start roscore before you run any commands/nodes, and the errors you get for failing to do so are usually unhelpful and nothing along the lines of "roscore isn't running!"