Alright, I've got it locked down to the absence of a TERM environment variable in the autopkgtest environment. If I run the same command outside of autopkgtest, after running `unset TERM`, i get the exact same failure.
So, this failure is IMHO definitely worth fixing, and I intend to do so now, but this is also a very atypical configuration. Users will generally have a TERM environment variable. I.e., I do not think this would have been reported as a bug were it not for the test. So hopefully this won't be a problem despite soft freeze. I'm preparing the fix now. Thanks to Antonio Terceiro and Daniel Leidert for their assistance on debian-devel in working with autopkgtest/debci! I really appreciate it.
