Comment 6 for bug 673350

The .list file is supposed to contain a list of all the files installed by the emacs23 package. It is managed by dpkg. Reinstalling emacs23 should recreate this file, with a list of all files installed.

The lack of required files from various packages is definitely the root cause here. When a package is installed, its files should be written to disk, but this doesn't seem to be true for you always. I can repeat my speculation that there could be a dpkg sync problem (bug #512096) -- perhaps you could try again with a different version of dpkg?

If your aim is to simply get this out of the way as soon as possible, I cannot help but think a complete reinstall would seem like the safest way to proceed. If you can help figure out why this is happening, and live with the current situation a little while longer, it would be much appreciated, though.

Just to reduce the number of variables, you could remove a2ps and auctex from your system for the time being, then reinstall emacsen-common until 00debian-vars.el et al. are properly created.

You have not experienced a disk full condition at any point during this, have you?