Comment 14 for bug 15179

Well, it is simple change to 'allow' people to do this without loosing their work and the discouragement lies in the extra effort to pick the file up from the personal garbage bin rather than from /tmp. A preference could control this behaviour of sysvinit to be turned on or off.

I guess your point is that this "bug" resides somewhere else. So maybe it is a feature request instead. It could not be implemented as separate script and linked in as /etc/rcS.d/S32copy-savedintmp or similar executed before the actual cleanup because at that point the disk is not mounted.