Comment 8 for bug 164254

I didn't figure out exactly what was causing it but its definitely because some one is using dash to do something dash doesn't do. I changed the interpreter from /bin/sh a link to dash to /bin/bash and now the world is happy again.

So I answer my own question here the quick fix:

Edit the first line of /var/lib/dpkg/info/tzdata.postinst replacing #!/bin/sh with #!/bin/bash