alsa-base fails to properly upgrade as of 5/25/09

[William LaFrance]

Binary package hint: alsa-base

I ran into this bug when performing this command:

sudo apt-get upgrade; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

Which should, obviously, update the APT list and then perform all upgrades. All packages installed properly except for alsa, and the backports modules were held back, as they seem to depend on alsa-base. See the following output for the next run:

william@inspiration:~$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  linux-backports-modules-karmic linux-backports-modules-karmic-generic
The following packages will be upgraded:
  alsa-base
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
38 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/270kB of archives.
After this operation, 16.4kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 193200 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace alsa-base 1.0.19.dfsg-3ubuntu1 (using .../alsa-base_1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu1_all.deb) ...
dpkg (subprocess): unable to execute new pre-installation script: Exec format error
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/alsa-base_1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu1_all.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/alsa-base_1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu1_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Sorry I can't recommend a fix as I'm not sure how dpkg works fully, but good luck. :)

====================================

william@inspiration:~$ lsb_release -rd; apt-cache policy alsa-base linux-backports-modules-karmic linux-backports-modules-karmic-generic
Description: Ubuntu karmic (development branch)
Release: 9.10
alsa-base:
  Installed: 1.0.19.dfsg-3ubuntu1
  Candidate: 1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu1
  Version table:
     1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
 *** 1.0.19.dfsg-3ubuntu1 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
linux-backports-modules-karmic:
  Installed: 2.6.30.5.4
  Candidate: 2.6.30.6.5
  Version table:
     2.6.30.6.5 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
 *** 2.6.30.5.4 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
linux-backports-modules-karmic-generic:
  Installed: 2.6.30.5.4
  Candidate: 2.6.30.6.5
  Version table:
     2.6.30.6.5 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
 *** 2.6.30.5.4 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Toni Spets (hifi)]

Also confirming on x86.