upstart not reacting to stop condition

[Paul Crawford]

I am trying to change the shutdown operation of rsyslog so it logs more of the system closing messages (see Bug #1192037). My goal was to use a combination of runlevel [06] and the closing of a late process (e.g. unattended-upgrades) to delay the closing of rsyslog to shortly before file systems were unmounted.
However, when I tried modified the rsyslog.conf file to test this I am finding it is not behaving as documented in respect to stopping rsyslog when the other process is stopped. For example, I changed the entry in rsyslog.conf from:
  stop on runlevel [06]
to:
  stop on stopped watchdog
But upstart appears to ignore this:

paul@ubuntu:~$ initctl show-config rsyslog
rsyslog
  start on filesystem
  stop on stopped watchdog
paul@ubuntu:~$ sudo service watchdog stop
 * Stopping watchdog daemon... [ OK ]
 * Starting watchdog keepalive daemon... [ OK ]
paul@ubuntu:~$ sudo service watchdog status
 * watchdog is not running
paul@ubuntu:~$ sudo service rsyslog status
rsyslog start/running, process 4332

I expected that rsyslog would be stopped by my action of stopping the watchdog process, as described in the man page examples.

paul@ubuntu:~$ apt-cache policy upstart
upstart:
  Installed: 1.5-0ubuntu7.2
  Candidate: 1.5-0ubuntu7.2
  Version table:
 *** 1.5-0ubuntu7.2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.5-0ubuntu5 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages

paul@ubuntu:~$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 3.2.0-67-generic-pae #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 18:04:54 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Attached to this report is the example rsyslog.conf file, in addition to the change of stop condition, it also has the temporary addition of some pre/post start/stop script entries to perform basic logging of the time of starting and stopping actions.