When the author was asked why his changes weren't merged upstream (which would have prevented his issues): > "A lot of this kind of stuff differs wildly betwee

When the author was asked why his changes weren't merged upstream (which would have prevented his issues): > "A lot of this kind of stuff differs wildly between the distributions, especially since no two distros share the same boot code. The simple fact was that the changes were sent upstream and rejected because they didn’t apply to Red Hat, and the RH way of doing things. Likewise they don’t apply to Debian since that uses sysvinit and (I believe) udev is still optional, etc" For a project as large and as complicated as Ubuntu, I imagine custom patches like the author's get lost periodically between release cycles, especially if they no longer apply cleanly to the latest upstream version. I guess I also find it hard to believe that the upstream maintainers (RH?) could not be worked with to get this eventually merged in. Difficult developers/teams do exist, but the difficulties in getting the patches accepted weren't really outlined in the post (so it's hard to know what happened). I also wonder how many alternative distros are using the unmodified upstream version of the package in question, meaning that the author may run into the same issue on other Linux distros as well.