Comment 4 for bug 980573

In my report I think the key

There were not files in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ for libc6:i386, only for libc6 (ie /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6.list existed but /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:i386.list did not).

I created the /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:i386.list file from the contents of the downloaded deb package using:

dpkg-deb -c /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.15-0ubuntu10.5_i386.deb | awk {'sub(/^\./,"",$6);sub(/^\/$/,"/.",$6); sub(/\/$/,"",$6); print $6'} > /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:i386.list

After this 'apt-get install -f' run correctly and the libc6 package was upgraded. Then the rest of the package upgrades were done via aptitude.

The mention of libc6:i386 suggests that the problem maybe linked to multiarch, but I can not be sure. I also suggest that copying /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6.list to /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:i386.list might also work temporarily.

So fixed for me for the moment.