Abologies to Yann since I cc'ed 2 bugs with this, but I think it should be in the discussion of both.
While this bug *is* resolved in 1999.08.29-9 for me the prerm script in 1999.08.29-8 (the one that actually broke on my machine) fails, so the new one does not get installed. In my case, the solution was to obtain the actual deb (should be in /var/cache/apt/archives/console-data_1999.08.29-9_all.deb if apt just failed) and dpkg -i --force confnew console-data_1999.08.29-9.deb. That made the install succeed. I don't know if there is any way to make this automatically use the new scripts, but it would help.
