Comment 8 for bug 183729

Here's the workaround I found myself, in case somebody is interested. Install the runit package, which seems to handle utmp better than upstart does, copy the /etc/sv/getty-5 directory that comes with it to /etc/sv/getty-1 through getty-4 and getty-6, modify the run and finish scripts and the supervise link in these directories, changing the tty numbers accordingly. Finally, stop upstart from running getty by moving /etc/event.d/tty? elsewhere and tell runit to take charge of running them by making soft links from /etc/service/getty-? to /etc/sv/getty-?. That's it, no more stale utmp entries.

I'm still interested if anybody cares to comment on whether there is a better workaround than this one.

As a side note, pardon my ignorance, but I thought moving a bug upstream meant that it is actually caused by some other bug in an underlying package, but I couldn't find the continuation of this bug anywhere in launchpad. So is it abandoned or where was it taken up?