Comment 1 for bug 334763

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and help to improve Ubuntu.

While the way in which you encountered this bug is flawed (you should not edit package-owned files under /usr/share, your changes will be discarded on package upgrade), this is a bug, mainly because there is a chance that extra copies of config files will be present while dpkg is in the middle of upgrading packages. So we need to ignore .dpkg-new versions of files in this directory, and can just as well ignore ~ files too.