removing upstart breaks user login

[god]

After "apt remove upstart" it's impossible to login into user's session via lightdm on xubuntu 16.04 - I thought we've finally ditched that junk, how come it still breaks the system on removal?

[Joe Philipps (2-launchpad-joe-philipps-us)]

I was surprised to find it running after booting my system. Apparently it's still used for Xorg session management, like "/sbin/upstart --user" in the ps(1) listing. My guess is that lightdm or something else that initiates your X session either by default, or is configured to, run /sbin/upstart in user mode to handle launching everything in one's session (the panel, the window manager, etc.).

[god (humper)]

16.10 is slightly better in this regard - at least login is possible when upstart is purged, but the fact that it's still installed by default is alarming: did they forgot to fix smth again?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

I'm sorry, but you forcibly removed a package which was a *correct* dependency of the ubuntu-desktop metapackage in Ubuntu 16.04. The fact that this resulted in a broken system is not a bug in the ubuntu-meta package.