Comment 3 for bug 665022

To add to Scotts comments, Upstart explicitly does not support symbolic links at present. The primary motivation is that Upstart must be able to locate *all* job configuration files at boot time, since if it could not do this, the system may be unbootable. Symbolic links allow cross-filesystem links to be created, hence cannot be trusted as we cannot rely on the ordering of filesystems being mounted.

Imagine a system with a separate /etc and /usr partition: if links existed in /etc/init/ to /usr/local/etc/, the links in /etc/init/ would be "broken" *until* the /usr/local/etc/ FS was available. If this happened after /etc/init/ was mounted, the system could well be unbootable.