Comment 19 for bug 434232

vbar : Giving the ability to a software to freeze the boot can lead to many problems, this is not how upstart works. Upstart let you do it in a very more flexible way as you can define which tasks require each other, which slightly reduce probabilities of boot problems. This concept boost boot preformances by starting tasks by events, and many tasks at the same time.

What you say is already implemented, most of task depend on root filesystem, but the computer does not need other filesystem than root to be mounted to boot correctly, therefore it makes no sense to depend on other filesystems then root. If your Windows NTFS partition doesn't want to mount because it is unclean, or if your fstab is misconfigured, would you be happy to see your computer wait infinitely for it? Anyhow, there is no reason why the computer wouldn't continue to boot at the same time that it asks your password.

This bug only need something to be done that would be compatible with new setup. As I said earlier, maybe that implementing password prompt via xsplash would be a potential solution. Ubuntu developer probably alreaday have a idea about how to fix this problem in the future.

Until that moment, it's possible to mount a cryptsetup partition from initramfs or directly in GNOME, so technically speaking, no real feature as been lost in this bug. Cryptsetup simply needs to be configured differently than before.