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Ran out of disk space in /var/… canceled dist-upgrade, resulting with:

Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: error processing base-files (--configure):
 package base-files is not ready for configuration
 cannot configure (current status `triggers-awaited')
Errors were encountered while processing:
 base-files
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Ouch!

So what to do… looking in /var/lib/apt/status:

Package: base-files
Essential: yes
Status: install ok triggers-awaited
Priority: required
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 432
Maintainer: Santiago Vila 
Architecture: amd64
Version: 4.0.5
Replaces: base, miscutils
Provides: base
Depends: base-passwd (>= 2.0.3.4)
Pre-Depends: awk
Conffiles:
 /etc/debian_version c3a1f14e3cfb4e2a815ff14692258219
 /etc/host.conf 4eb63731c9f5e30903ac4fc07a7fe3d6
 /etc/issue c5b47f7de972ac3f083cc6349bcb23db
 /etc/issue.net ad006ab49199770f760dac332209cb27
Description: Debian base system miscellaneous files
 This package contains the basic filesystem hierarchy of a Debian system, and
 several important miscellaneous files, such as /etc/debian_version,
 /etc/host.conf, /etc/issue, /etc/motd, /etc/profile, /etc/nsswitch.conf,
 and others, and the text of several common licenses in use on Debian systems.
Triggers-Awaited: man-db

Going to re-install man-db:

dpkg -P man-db
apt-get install man-db
apt-get dist-upgrade

Yes! It worked!