Comment 51 for bug 990740

I fell into this bug doing a test upgrade in a virtual machine before upgrading a working server. Created the VM from the original distribution disk and then ran 'do-release-upgrade'. The upgrade failed do a dependency problem - almost certainly because I had omitted to upgrade lucid to the current version. Running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' failed due to the 'pythin-minimal' problem. The fix at the top of the thread worked for me.

The problem seems due (at least in my case) to running do-release-upgrade on an out-of-date system. Maybe the script should "offer" to upgrade the current system first before performing the release upgrade.