Lucky guess & post-installation returned exit status 1
I’m running Debian Unstable and every now and then I have some problems after dist-upgrade. Couple of weeks ago I pumped into gimp-data reconfiguration issue and all I got was “subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1″. As I was in a hurry I just edited /var/lib/dpkg/status to mark the packages not installed.
Today I got the same error for Liferea and now I had the time to investigate. Firstly to turn debugging on for dpkg is a matter of dpkg -Ddebug_level_no. More info with dpkg -Dhelp. Next I ran dpkg -D10 –configure liferea and saw that the post installation configuration is held under /var/lib/dpkg/info. There was a script liferea.postinst.
In that script the line gtk-update-icon-cache –force –quiet “$dir” was failing with a message “The generated cache was invalid.”. I did not start debugging why this was happening. As the list of installed gtk related packages is quite short then I just installed gtk2-engines-pixbuf and the cache update started working. Lucky guess 
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