Installed debconf version is broken. Aborting preconfigure.

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

I got this message when doing an upgrade on Woody.  I do have few
backports installed, so it's not a pure Woody machine.

    # cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep '^deb '
    deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
    deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
    deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
    deb http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ametzler/debian/exim4manpages/ woody/
    deb http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ametzler/debian/gnutls/ woody/
    deb http://lackof.org/taggart/debian woody/chkrootkit main


It seems I do have a newer version of debconf installed:

    # apt-cache policy debconf
    debconf:
      Installed: 1.2.35
      Candidate: 1.2.35
      Version Table:
     *** 1.2.35 0
            100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
         1.0.32 0
            500 http://http.us.debian.org stable/main Packages

I suspect not, but is there a way to find out where the installed
debconf package came from?

How do I know what problems my have resulted from this failure?
What should I do to follow up and make sure everything is working?


BTW -- I use backports (for exim and spamassassin mostly).  What
procedures do I need to follow when upgrading to Sarge?  Will I just
remove those lines from my sources.list?


# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Calculating Upgrade... Done
5 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
Need to get 1593kB of archives. After unpacking 86.0kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main mysql-common 3.23.49-8.7 [17.0kB]
Get:2 http://www.logic.univie.ac.at woody/ exim4-config 4.34-4amwoody2 [177kB]
Get:3 http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main libmysqlclient10 3.23.49-8.7 [235kB]
Get:4 http://www.logic.univie.ac.at woody/ exim4-base 4.34-4amwoody2 [783kB]
Get:5 http://www.logic.univie.ac.at woody/ exim4-daemon-heavy 4.34-4amwoody2 [382kB]               
Fetched 1593kB in 19s (79.8kB/s)                                                                   
Preconfiguring packages ...
Installed debconf version is broken. Aborting preconfigure.
(Reading database ... 17229 files and directories currently installed.)




-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org