Comment 31 for bug 349469

dpkg-reconfigure in fact does not invoke either apt or dpkg, so it's normal that it doesn't take the locks. I think it would be very strange if either dpkg-reconfigure or tasksel accounted for the very many reports of this bug however, as both interfaces are very low-level and I would expect at least one of the bug submitters before now to have mentioned they were running such a command if so.

I think the duplicate bug count/frequency is a sign that something is going wrong and invoking debconf on behalf of the user *without* being initiated from the commandline.

I think I also have to say that, if this really comes down to dpkg-reconfigure or tasksel, rather than having these tools claim apt or dpkg locks directly, we should probably regard the failure as user error and arrange to suppress the error reporting.