service scripts on Ubuntu are extremely unhelpful in diagnostics AND broken in functionality

Scripts originating from hadoop-0.20-package/deb/debian.hadoop/service-init.d.tpl and
hadoop-0.20-package/deb/debian.hadoop/service-nn-init.d.tpl (e.g. /etc/init.d/hadoop-0.20-tasktracker)
contain quite a bit of the following (grep for ERROR to get the complete list):

stop)
echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
stop
if ! hadoop_check_pidfile $PID_FILE ; then
echo 'ERROR'
else
echo "$NAME."
fi
;;

This is extremely unhelpful and need to be fixed so that a real error message gets printed.
What's even more important is the fact that functionality-wise it is incorrect.

According the LSB:
http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.1/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/iniscrptact.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For all other init-script actions, the init script shall return an exit status of zero if the action
was successful. Otherwise, the exit status shall be non-zero, as defined below. In addition to straightforward success, the following situations are also to be considered successful:
...

running stop on a service already stopped or not running