Comment 3 for bug 155199

I had the same problem. It seems that the emacsen-common package was refusing to install two of its files (/etc/emacs/site-start.el and /etc/emacs/site-start.d/00debian-vars.el) and this caused the byte-compilation of .el files to fail. I was able to fix this by first installing the emacsen-common package, then using dpkg-deb to extract the files from the deb archive (dpkg-deb -X /var/cache/apt/archives/emacsen-common_1.4.17_all.deb emacsen-common_1.4.17_all) and then copying the missing files by hand into /etc/emacs. After that installation of the emacs package installed emacs22 without a hitch.

Prior to discovering this problem, I had removed all my emacs packages in an effort to get a clean install of emacs22 (I had been running emacs-snapshot and I think that emacs21 was also installed). In the process it seemed that there were a lot of emacs-snapshot and emacs21 related things around, and I had deleted some of them by hand, including /etc/emacs and various links in /usr/bin and /etc/alternatives. I don't know if this could cause reinstallation of emacs fail, but I thought that I should mention it just in case. I note that now I have links /usr/bin/emacs22 and /etc/alternatives/emacs22 and a few others, but no /usr/bin/emacs or /etc/alternatives/emacs. Is this intentional?