Comment 3 for bug 1220681

In the old version, voices/en/ is a directory:

  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data/voices/en/
  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data/voices/en/en
  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data/voices/en/en-us

(containing "en", "en-us", etc.), while in the new version it is a plain file:

  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data/voices/en
  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data/voices/en-us

So it looks to me like dpkg sometimes has troubles to replace the old directory with a file?

I tried this upgrade in a precise and quantal schroot (one using overlayfs, the other isn't, it's a tarball schroot) as well as just with espeak-data quantal → trusty upgrade on my production system, and on a precise live image. I also tried that upgrade with the old and new dpkg. In no case I could reproduce this bug.

As a workaround we might add a preinst script which just rm -r's /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data/voices before the upgrade, but that would actually be wrong in the case that the upgrade fails, and it would not explain why that bug happens in the first place.