Comment 2 for bug 1817077

Hi John,
the report has a lot of red herrings (all the error device is in use), but IMHO in the log the error that you hit was.

  Use of uninitialized value $reply in scalar chomp at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Passthrough.pm line 66

That is a known and unfortunate issue, as it occurs every now and then and sometimes is fixed but seems to come back - often with hard to analyze (and thereby hard to identify and fix) root causes.

It all seems like bug 1646739 to me, but since that was fixed in bug 1679435 it must be a new trigger for the same symptom.

In any case it is in debconf, so I add a bug task - but I also set it to incomplete as we'd need more information why/how it was triggered for you.

The only good side for now, usually it is a one off error that does work fine when retrying.