Comment 31 for bug 1072518

At Simon McVittie's suggestion (from dbus @freedesktop.org) and reding some of the comments from the bug duplicates of this bug. The general thought is that the Upstart/Sysvinit conflict may lie at the root of this issue. Since 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago, the dev's decided to use Upstart for the system init. Upstart is meant to be a complete replacement for Sysvinit. In the interest of backwards compatibility, the Upstart devs made some allowances so that people/packages still using sysvinit-style init scripts could continue to do so. The /etc/init.d/networking init script is written for sysvinit in such a way that calling it uses sysvinit methods and breaks dbus which is written for Upstart.

The solution here is to have the maintainer of the networking init script fix/rewrite it so that it is Upstart compatible. This may mean that the networking init script will lose compatibility with sysvinit, but they need to get over it. Sysvinit is deprecated/obsolete and too much effort is being wasted into maintaining it when the future is Upstart. And especially because Ubuntu's official init is Upstart, it would make sense to make it work with this package rather than a past one.

Eventually, when sysvinit is long dead, there will be no need for init scripts as Upstart does not need them, but fixing the current script is a good place to start.

/etc/init.d/networking is contained within package initscripts which is part of the sysvinit package which is maintained by the Ubuntu Core Developers mailto:<email address hidden>