Comment 27 for bug 328881

This is a question from a third party software developer: I've to support a legacy application
package which used to add an entry to /etc/inittab on traditional Unix/Linux systems to
start (and respawn) a certain demon.

When Ubuntu moved to upstart I added a /etc/event.d/-file template. Later I was forced to
add an additional *.conf template for /etc/init directory. My question is: What do I have to put
into these files to get the stderr output of this demon into the syslog on all versions of
Ubuntu? (we have a lot of 8.04 LTS still in use in the field; moving slowly to 10.04 LTS)
For me it is very difficult to figure this out. Thanks in advance.
Is installing a backported upstart package a viable option? How much risk is that?