I couldn’t find a good solution to this on the Web, so I’m providing one in case it helps anyone else.
I recently had a weird problem applying updates to Ubuntu Hardy, due to a failure while dpkg was configuring python2.5, giving me error messages like:
dpkg: error processing python2.5 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: python2.5-minimal python2.5
I fixed this by allowing the pycentral rtinstall command to overwrite “local” files (which weren’t actually local, I think they were left over from previous versions of Ubuntu–I have upgraded the OS several times). In /etc/python/debian_config, I added:
overwrite-local = True
“aptitude safe-upgrade” then ran without a hitch.