Comment 1 for bug 248939

I'm not sure that just returning the exit value will give you what you expect because in other patches we have identified that more and more init.d scripts are going to be running under a "set -e" environment where a non-zero return value terminates the script, so in your suggested patch, status $VERSION will terminate if the return value is non-zero, negating the purpose of exiting with a return value.

See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InitScriptStatusActions for further discussion.