Binary package hint: whois
The recent sync of whois is lacking a conflicts/replaces with the mkpasswd package, which was separated out by ubuntu in the lucid cycle to fix bug 284416. However, it was decided in bug 601803 to resume syncing whois with debian, but this breaks people who installed the mkpasswd package because mkpasswd is, you know, a useful utility.
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
whois
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/42.0kB of archives.
After this operation, 221kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 372258 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace whois 5.0.6ubuntu1 (using .../archives/whois_5.0.7_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement whois ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/whois_5.0.7_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/bin/mkpasswd', which is also in package mkpasswd 5.0.6ubuntu1
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/whois_5.0.7_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: whois 5.0.6ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-19.28-server 2.6.35.3
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-19-server x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Sep 7 16:50:00 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Alpha amd64 (20100330)
ProcEnviron:
PATH=(custom, user)
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: whois
Attached is a debdiff to add replaces: mkpasswd. I've verified that it fixes the broken upgrade issue on a couple of hosts that have hit the issue.