Only by patching Chef to avoid the nil error were we able to see that the issue was in fact an error with Module::Data:
! Installing Module::Data failed. See /home/vagrant/.cpanm/work/1384929078.27801/build.log for details. Retry with --force to force install it.
! Installing the dependencies failed: Module 'Module::Data' is not installed
! Bailing out the installation for App-DuckPAN-0.132.
---- End output of su -l vagrant -c 'bash -l -i -c "perl duckpan-install.pl"' ----
Ran su -l vagrant -c 'bash -l -i -c "perl duckpan-install.pl"' returned 1
Need to look into caching or otherwise stabilizing the dependencies for the environment to avoid these types of intermittant failures.
An issue with Module::Data (http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/KENTNL/Module-Data-0.007/Changes) blocked successful creation of the Vagrant environment. This was initially difficult to diagnose - it presented itself as a generic Chef error:
Only by patching Chef to avoid the nil error were we able to see that the issue was in fact an error with Module::Data:
Need to look into caching or otherwise stabilizing the dependencies for the environment to avoid these types of intermittant failures.