Puppet users - Mar 2014 - Yumhelper.py fails with exceptions.indexError on Python 2.7 hosts

In my Amazon Linux environment, I have a couple of images on which I've 
changed the default python installation from 2.6 to 2.7.  These hosts have 
been running fine for a couple of months, but in the past couple of days 
I've discovered they've developed an error when running Puppet catalogs.
 The issue very closely mimics the one reported (but not answered)
here<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-users/uPbSRz_zY2A>.
 

When running the catalog, I see (abbreviated output follows):

info: Caching catalog for hostname.acme.com
info: Applying configuration version '1396035115'
err: Could not prefetch package provider 'yum': Execution of 
'/usr/bin/python 
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/provider/package/yumhelper.py' returned 
1: _pkg audit.x86_64 0 amzn main 2.3.2-3.19.amzn1
_pkg audit-libs.x86_64 0 amzn main 2.3.2-3.19.amzn1
_pkg augeas-devel.x86_64 0 amzn main 1.0.0-5.7.amzn1
_pkg augeas-libs.x86_64 0 amzn main 1.0.0-5.7.amzn1
[ much more of the same ]
_pkg libgomp.x86_64 0 amzn main 4.8.2-7.87.amzn1
_pkg libicu.x86_64 0 amzn main 50.1.2-8.10.amzn1
<type 'exceptions.IndexError'>

The catalog then runs as usual but there do seem to be some knock-on 
effects.  Packages alphabetically later than libicu which should be subject 
to an update are not being updated, and if the catalog updates resources 
which should notify a service, that notification seems to be getting lost. 
 There are no "service refresh" messages posted in the output (this is
particularly troublesome on the nagios host!)

So based on the 2011
post<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-users/uPbSRz_zY2A>,
I re-ran yumhelper.py with python 2.6, also installed on the system.  In 
that case, it completes without error... although the output isn't 
alphabetical... here's a snippet of that output:

Loaded plugins: priorities, update-motd, upgrade-helper
66 packages excluded due to repository priority protections
_pkg perl-XML-SAX 0 0.99 8.12.amzn1 noarch
_pkg rubygem19-rdoc 0 3.9.5 32.62.amzn1 noarch
_pkg perl-TimeDate 1 2.30 1.6.amzn1 noarch

And if I run just 'yum check-update', the next package alphabetically
after
libicu is as follows:

libpcap.x86_64                                         
 14:1.4.0-1.20130826git2dbcaa1.10.amzn1                         amzn-main

If I uninstall libpcap, I still get the yumhelper.py error, this time 
occurring after yum-utils... and in the 'yum check-update' output, the
next
thing after that is:

Obsoleting Packages
coreutils.x86_64                                             
 8.21-13.31.amzn1                                         amzn-main
    coreutils-libs.x86_64                                     
8.4-31.17.amzn1                                          @amzn-updates

So it seems that depending on the python version, we are getting very 
different output from yumhelper.py.  I wish I could provide more of a hint 
as to why things changed, but I'm drawing a blank.  It might be worth 
noting that Amazon released a new image yesterday (details
here<http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2014.03-release-notes/>)
which is probably in some way related as the errors began occurring almost 
at the exact same time (Amazon also update their yum repo to match the 
software changes in the new image)... but as I mentioned, I don't see any 
recent updates applied via yum that would've triggered this issue.  

Thanks for reading and any suggestions you can offer!!

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