I was setting up a new machine, and only happen to have feisty net-install set up on the local network, so I figured I would just install a minimal feisty and then upgrade.
The feisty install went fine, and when it asked what metapackages to install (Gnome desktop, KDE desktop, LAMP server, etc.), I just left all the boxes unchecked.
Then I ran
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade # This upgraded 'mount'
aptitude install update-manager-core
do-release-upgrade
Which downloaded things, etc., as intended, and then blew up on package 'ttf-opensymbol', whose postinst failed.
Re-running dpkg --configure -a, the message is:
Setting up ttf-opensymbol (1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5) ...
Updating fontconfig cache...
/usr/share/fonts: failed to write cache
/usr/local/share/fonts: failed to write cache
dpkg: error processing ttf-opensymbol (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
<then more failures from openoffice packages that dpkg skips because they depend on ttf-opensymbol>
/var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log is empty; I'll attach main.log and main_pre_req.log.
Oh, and forgot to mention -- this was all with the amd64 version of ubuntu, on a Thinkpad T61.