Comment 53 for bug 147429

Ok, I was right, it was a mismatch between perl and libraries it depends on. Here is what I did. (This is all for Kubuntu but as the upgrade manager died early in the process and I did everything from the command line I presume this applies to Ubuntu as well). First I thought maybe it installed new libc but not perl so I installed new perl packages manually from /var/cache/apt/archive. That did not help so I decided to reboot. After the reboot the X did not come up but I expected that. 'dpkg --configure debconf' still crashed. So here we have old libc6 and new perl (which behaves exactly like the old one) and the debconf script makes perl crash with corrupted stack. It follows that there is some other library required by perl that has been upgraded for Gutsy and which really requires new libc but wasn't configured to depend on the new libc.

I installed the new libc6 packages manually. Finally 'dpkg --configure debconf' worked!

I went on to do the usual loop of 'dpkg --configure -a', 'apt-get -f install' and 'apt-get dist-upgrade' ad nauseum untill it installed all the packages. At one point I had to manually install acpid because it refused to restart it from the apt-get process.

I rebooted and got kernel panic and missing /dev/null. I unplugged the machine and booted it up again. Finally I have working Kubuntu 7.10.

So it all comes down to bad dependencies wich is really sad - both perl and libc are such a fundamental parts of the system that one would think they should have been tested to death.