Hello, thanks for the report. However you are extremely unclear on your description of the problem.

First of all the python2.7 package does not depend on python-configparser. If that package gets installed, it's because of one of its reverse dependencies.

Then in Kali we have version 3.3.0r2 of that package. What is the problem with that version?

I just tried on a clean system to do:

apt install python-configparser

python

Python 2.7.11+ (default, Feb 22 2016, 16:38:42)
[GCC 5.3.1 20160220] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import configparser
c = configparser.ConfigParser()
c['DEFAULT'] = {'foo': 'bar'}

And I get no backtrace. So if anything is broken, it's likely due to "pip" usage installing non-packaged code. In kali and in any packaged distribution, don't use pip outside of virtualenv... you will only break your system at some point.

Please perform the exact process as this has been reproduced by others as well:
1) download kali VM or ISO: https://images.offensive-security.com/virtual-images/Kali-Linux-2016.1-vm-amd64.7z
2) run commands in the image within python (should work)
3) run: apt-get update
4) run: apt-get upgrade
5) run: apt-get dist-upgrade
6) now run the commands again (Error is produced)
7) apt-get remove python-configparser
6) pip install configparser
8) run commands as before and it will work

Dont deviate or install anything with pip beforehand and this produced the issue.

Ok, so the problem comes the "python-future" package. It also provides a configparser module... if you remove that package, the module provided by python-configparser will again work (no need to pip install anything).

I'm not sure how to best solve that conflict... it must probably be handled at the python-future level. It has been already reported though:
https://github.com/PythonCharmers/python-future/issues/118

:-(

I also filed https://bugs.debian.org/822157 to get this resolved on the Debian side.

rhertzog thanks for hunting this down man! Lets hope we can get it fixed.

This has been fixed with python-future 0.15.2-2 which is now available in kali-rolling.