Comment 16 for bug 124373

This bug was originally reported 18 months ago and it now has 23 duplicates. In general, the advice has been to run

sudo dpkg --configure -a
followed by at least
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

while this action seems to have corrected the problem for some users, others including my self have found that dpkg --configure -a also fails.

My question is -
What action must be taken to re-enable the ability to update Ubuntu after a dpkg failure that cannot be recovered with dpkg --configure. I can use neither update-manager nor apt at this point.

I am running on 8.10 and got the following result from dpkg

Setting up icedtea6-plugin (6b12-0ubuntu6.1) ...

Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:221: process_queue: Assertion `dependtry <= 4' failed.
Aborted
jonathan@hippocrates:~$ sudo apt-get -f install
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
jonathan@hippocrates:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Processing triggers for menu ...
dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:221: process_queue: Assertion `dependtry <= 4' failed.
Aborted

A second question is: what is being done to make the low level update code such as dpkg more robust?