I brought this up in bug #601054 as well, but thought I'd mention it here since this seems to be the same issue. Upstream we're experimenting with using /var/lib/insserv/ as the location for storing boot-time dependency data. However, I'm not sure we can rely on /var being mounted when startpar runs. Which makes me this this bug, which requests the data be placed under /lib/insserv/ might be the better approach.
Thoughts on this? I'm not sure it's safe to put boot-time configuration data under /var, but I'm not sure if it's a practical concern or just a theoretical one. - Jesse