Comment 18 for bug 1242376

I think it's not exactly clear here, why this cannot be fixed right away in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

The main problem is that 'upstart' is not following Postel's principle (be benevolent in what you receive, and strict in what you send) and barfs and breaks whole release upgrade process if it encounters directive it doesn't know about.

In this case the problem gets triggered on upgrades from Ubuntu 12.04 when upstart has been upgraded to 1.12.1, but the PID 1 (/sbin/init) is still binary from upstart 1.5 that fails to start/stop php5-fpm and thus breaking the whole upgrade process.

This has by no means an easy fix and only possible solution would be to fix that first in precise upstart to just ignore (print warning) on unknown directives in init files and then fix this in Ubuntu 14.04.

Hmm, or we can just patch php5-fpm to reload on SIGHUP :).