Greetings, as I just ran into the same problem, here is the likely cause for this reported bug: puppetd creates those local directories (e.g. client_yaml) with the proper permissions if required, but it doesn't do so when being run in --noop mode (--noop can be seen in Adrian's previous comment).
Could be helpful if either a) the package shipped those directories out-of-the-box b) puppetd would create the directories even when called with --noop c) puppetd would emit a notice pointing out the --noop issue Sebastian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org