Comment 7 for bug 1001460

the issue is that the preinst scripts for the base system are run in lexical order, with makedev coming before sysv-rc - so while /usr/sbin/update-rc.d has been unpacked on the system, the preinst has not been run and therefore makedev's invocation fails with this error.

The update-rc.d invocation was failing before anyway, it's just that now in precise, the makedev preinst script is set -e where before it was not, so the update-rc.d failure is being caught.

So we should fix makedev to not call update-rc.d - certainly not in this case, where it can't possibly be relevant.