Direct rules in direct.xml

Hi, I had understood that direct rules stored in the direct.xml do survive reloads/reboots. At least in my case (Debian 7 with firewalld 0.3.12) that's not the case, meaning that after a reload no direct rules are applied. Is it a known issue? Is it working as expected? How should I proceed to make the permanent? (and no, I cannot use rich rules in this case due to the same reasons mentioned in [1]). BR [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=892801