Comment 52 for bug 147429

I have just encountered this bug trying to upgrade to Gutsy. And I thought that by now it should be mature enough :(

At this point none of the recipes given above work, all I am getting is

dpkg --configure -a
Setting up debconf (1.5.14ubuntu1) ...
*** stack smashing detected ***: /usr/bin/perl terminated
dpkg: error processing debconf (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script killed by signal (Segmentation fault)
Setting up dash (0.5.4-1ubuntu3) ...
*** stack smashing detected ***: /usr/bin/perl terminated
dpkg: error processing dash (--configure):

etc no matter how many times I try. Both apt-get and aptitude refuse to do anything and tell me to run 'dpkg --configure -a' first. I deleted the dpkg lock files as well.

To me it looks like a problem with upgrading of perl packages since debconf is written is perl and it is clear that perl process crashes with stack corruption. Since everything else depends on debconf the upgrade logic is stuck. Not very nice coming from something released months ago...