Comment 1 for bug 673350

The symptoms seem to point to missing files. I have been speculating that these might be caused by dpkg fsync problems. In any event, you may be able to recover by purging, then reinstalling dictionaries-common. As for the a2ps problem, purging a2ps should allow you to install emacs23 and emacs-snapshot; you may possibly be able to reinstall a2ps then, but this could be over-optimistic speculation on my part.

I'm hesitant to reassign this to dictionaries-common and/or a2ps and/or dpkg until we hear back from you. If you can report your dpkg version here, that would be most helpful.

I'm setting the status of this bug report to Incomplete to signal that we are expecting a followup from you. The status can be changed back to New (or even Confirmed) once you supply the requested information. Thanks in advance!