Comment 23 for bug 1069209

Same problem here, except the problem occured on my upgrading to ubuntu 12.04 (from oneiric).
As I have two computers with fairly similar systems, and upgraded only one to Precise, I've been able to do some comparing, and here's what I found :

- on the computer with Oneiric, the xemacs lisp-directory (resp. data-directory, mule-lisp-directory) are /usr/lib/xemacs-21.4.22/lisp/ (resp. ..../etc/, ..../lisp/mule)

- on the computer I upgraded to Precise, the corresponding folders (with the exact same contents) are located in /usr/share (for instance /usr/share/xemacs-21.4.22/lisp). It seems this is the reason xemacs -- and the configuration script -- can't find them. The following naive fix worked : I created two symlinks in /usr/lib/xemacs-21.4.22/ pointing to the correct locations :

cd /usr/lib/xemacs-21.4.22/
sudo ln -s /usr/share/xemacs-21.4.22/lisp lisp
sudo ln -s /usr/share/xemacs-21.4.22/etc etc

Now both
sudo dpkg --configure -a
and xemacs itself work properly. I hope this helps to trace the source of the bug.