Comment 1 for bug 1282046

What exactly is problematic about this? The /etc/motd symlink is removed on upgrade because it is no longer being used by the stock PAM config, in favor of reading /run/motd.dynamic directly. (This change was driven by the sysvinit maintainer in Debian; the previous setup worked fine, but given that Debian has changed there doesn't seem to be any benefit to *not* following suit.

If you had an existing /etc/motd which was not a symlink, it would be preserved and would still be displayed on login. If you had an /etc/motd.tail that was being appended to /run/motd by /etc/update-motd.d/99-footer, this would now be handled by a separate invocation of pam_motd from the relevant pam config.

If there is software in Ubuntu that's not displaying the correct output as a result of this change, please let us know what that is. But this doesn't appear to be a bug in the initscripts package's behavior.