Comment 6 for bug 542627

After making some test upstart jobs, I've convinced myself that the

stop on starting shutdown

line contained in /etc/init/mythtv-backend.conf can be changed to

stop on (starting shutdown or stopping mysql)

In my experiments, "stopping" clauses in upstart can refer to non-existent items. In other words, if mysql is not installed, this should still work fine. Only downside would be a unique config of a slave mythbackend on the same machine as a independent instance of mysql running for some other purpose. It seems to me that this is less likely than possible database corruption.