After some investigation it turns out that this problem is more widespread than I had thought. KDE and XFCE both make power management configurable, and both have other default actions for the power button. XFCE asks the user what to do, KDE displays the log out dialog.
To reproduce install kde-plasma-netbook (or another metapackage), xfce4 and xfce4-goodies. Both have power management settings. I have attached two screenshots of those settings options in the default configuration. I did not test more desktop environments (mate, cinnamon..), but it's possible that they do similar things. In those cases no user interaction is necessary to change the previous behavior in a way that can lead to data loss. This bug also seems to be the cause of #776422 which you might want to merge. Just mentioning this in the release notes might not be enough. I don't know if there is a debconf note about porting init scripts to systemd, but if there is this change should maybe be displayed as prominently. It might affect less users but the consequences can be more severe than services not starting. It might be a good idea to involve the DDs of various desktop environments to see who is affected. Thank you, Nicolas -- Jean-Nicolas Kuttler Web : http://kuttler.eu/de/ | http://kuttler.eu Mail : off...@kuttler.eu Tel. : +49 681 3838138