I cannot reproduce your failure. I can install emacspeak-ss with no problem on my system.
I have not worked with pbuilder before. However, I tried apt-get install cowbuilder cowbuilder --create cowbuilder --login apt-get install emacspeak-ss and it installed fine. I'm inclined to think there's something odd about your pbuilder chroot. emacspeak and emacspeak-ss use debconf. I see from the pbuilder documentation that you're supposed to set export DEBIAN_FRONTEND="readline" in /etc/pbuilder/pbuilder.conf, or maybe "dialog". I tried both settings, and the default "noninteractive", and all three worked. What setting are you using? If you create a new chroot from scratch, does it show the same problem? - Jim Van Zandt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org