Ok, I think #962412 and #960934 can be closed. The patch was upstreamed to sysvinit/insserv. I assume the next version of insserv in Debian will have this patch. http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git/commit/?h=1.22.0&id=6a65f4412a2d24d78741f49e64e1128993341e65 Thank you, Ivan