The problem with debconf needs a little explanation. As show, the
command that caused the failure was:

/usr/bin/perl -w /usr/share/debconf/frontend /var/lib/dpkg/info/man-
db.postinst triggered /usr/share/man

The 'frontend' perl script determines which type of debconf frontend to
display. In this case, the gnome frontend was selected. debconf then
goes to some pains to ensure that the gtk bindings work. However,
because of the gsettings schema problem, as soon as any perl script
called 'use Gtk2;', the schema was queried, which resulted in the crash.

Since the master debconf process calls 'use Gtk2;' unconditionally, the
schema problem caused debconf (technically the perl interpreter) to
crash.  And since debconf re-execs the original caller (in this case
'/var/lib/dpkg/info/man-db.postinst') as itself, this stopped debconf
from falling back to other frontends as it should as it was now
effectively dead.

The fix is for debconf to only 'use Gtk2;' when it has proven that this
operation can be performed without impacting the perl interpreter. This
allows it to fall back gracefully to alternative frontends.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1060249

Title:
  frontend crashed with signal 5 in free_pending_nulls()

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