Comment 7 for bug 940374

After talking with the 'deborphan' maintainer, it appears that fixing this issue would require uploading a newer 'deborphan' and a newer 'synaptics' (which depends upon specific deborphan features and fails with multiarch packages in a way similar to upgrade-system) to Precise-updates. In both cases, the idea is to implement explicit support for multiarch results returned by dpkg. Alternately, a kludge has been invented for 'upgrade-system' (see attached patch) which could be uploaded to Precise. However, the same issue affects synaptics as well, so perhaps it would be more desirable to upload fixed versions of deborphan and synaptics to precise-updates, since upgrade-system itself is totally agnostic to how dpkg/deborphan/apt perform under the hood.

For Quantal and newer releases, the issue will resolve itself magicaly, since more recent dpkg/deborphan/synpatics featuring the final i.e. non-WIP version of multiarch support will be imported from Debian.