Comment 3 for bug 552816

I was just trying another test upgrade on the same virtual machine (from karmic to lucid).

This time, the coreutils/gnulib bug actually caused the upgrade process to abort, after dpkg printed these line:
==========
Setting up slapd (2.4.21-0ubuntu3) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/ldap/schema/ldapns.schema ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.slapd ...
  Backing up /etc/ldap/slapd.d/ in /var/backups/slapd-2.4.18-0ubuntu1... cp: preserving times for `/var/backups/slapd-2.4.18-0ubuntu1/slapd.d/cn=config/cn=schema': Bad file descriptor
cp: preserving times for `/var/backups/slapd-2.4.18-0ubuntu1/slapd.d/cn=config': Bad file descriptor
cp: preserving times for `/var/backups/slapd-2.4.18-0ubuntu1/slapd.d': Bad file descriptor
dpkg: error processing slapd (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
===============

(Note that the three paths mentioned in the error messages all refer to directories.)

I was able to get slapd to install/configure successfully by extracting the /bin/tar binary out of the Debian Squeeze coreutils 8.4 package, installing it into /bin on my test system, and then running "dpkg --configure --pending"...