Comment 2 for bug 456523

severity 153860 serious
thanks

Hi.. I've experienced this problem as well, this time with the sawfish
package.

I did a full upgrade today, which included an upgrade of sawfish and a
new install of emacsen-common. As a result:

  Preparing to replace sawfish 1:1.3+cvs20031104-2 (using
    .../sawfish_1%3a1.3+cvs20031104-3_i386.deb) ...
  ERROR: emacsen-common being used before being configured.
  ERROR: This is likely a bug in the sawfish package, which needs to
  ERROR: add one of the appropriate dependencies.
  ERROR: See /usr/share/doc/emacsen-common/debian-emacs-policy.gz
  ERROR: for details.
  dpkg: warning - old pre-removal script returned error exit status 2
  dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
  ERROR: emacsen-common being used before being configured.
  ERROR: This is likely a bug in the sawfish package, which needs to
  ERROR: add one of the appropriate dependencies.
  ERROR: See /usr/share/doc/emacsen-common/debian-emacs-policy.gz
  ERROR: for details.
  dpkg: error processing
  /var/cache/apt/archives/sawfish_1%3a1.3+cvs20031104-3_i386.deb
  (--unpack):
   subprocess new pre-removal script returned error exit status 2

I presume the error was generated by the prerm for the old sawfish,
which calls emacs-package-remove. At this stage emacsen-common has been
unpacked but not configured.

I'm marking this as serious since it causes packages to fail to
configure. If it's a sawfish problem, feel free to reassign it - I'm
not particularly familiar with emacs policy. However, if emacsen-common
requires itself to be configured before use then it seems that packages
such as gettext-el and sawfish should pre-depend on emacsen-common,
which is certainly not mentioned in emacs policy.

CCing the sawfish maintainer also.

Thanks - Ben. :)