Comment 10 for bug 840306

@Christian: I don't think so, these were apparently fixed in etckeeper 0.56ubuntu2.1 which is the version I'm running and I still see the problem.

I've actually been able to trace the problem to $VCS subprocess launched by etckeeper hanging when trying to write to stdout/stderr. What is happening in my case is: /etc/etckeeper/commit.d/50vcs-commit is trying to determine the username and runs bzr whoami, this process hangs and strace shows:

Process 7327 attached - interrupt to quit
write(2, "bzr: ERROR: Unable to determine "..., 139

This would also happen if it got through to actually running $VCS commit, I think. I haven't checked yet what qaptworker does with stdout/stderr of launched sub-processes, but I did notice it allocates a pty.