colord failed to install: gpasswd: group 'scanner' does not exist in /etc/group

[John C. Martin]

dist upgrade to oneiric initiated using kpackagekit on an i386 w/ natty installed. Process issued message about installation of colord package failing and then continued to this point with another message indicating the upgrade has aborted and the system could be in an unusable state. I do not know at this point if the recovery will be successful.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: update-manager (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Oct 14 08:56:38 2011
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110427)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: update-manager
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-14 (0 days ago)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

Could you please attach all the files from /var/log/dist-upgrade/* ?

[John C. Martin (john-martin)]

System rebooted OK, but left a few packages with broken dependencies that I fixed using aptitude. Then it took a while to sort what was going on with kmail2 refusing to run.

Attached are is a tarball of the /var/log/dist-upgrade files - there were a pile of them.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for the logs. The error is
Setting up colord (0.1.12-1ubuntu2) ...

Adding system user `colord' (UID 115) ...

Adding new user `colord' (UID 115) with group `colord' ...

Creating home directory `/var/lib/colord' ...

gpasswd: group 'scanner' does not exist in /etc/group

adduser: `/usr/bin/gpasswd -a colord scanner' returned error code 3. Exiting.

dpkg: error processing colord (--configure):

 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

moving to colord