Failure when chef-client run by cron / su and no failure when run sudo interactive

[rberger]

This is a very bizarre failure as far as I can tell. If I use the python_runtime on ubuntu 16.04 and do the chef-client run via cron or interactively su - it always fails in the setuptools. But if I run it with just a plain sudo it runs fine.

The actual failure is:

    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/cachecontrol/serialize.py", line 176, in _loads_v2
      cached = json.loads(zlib.decompress(data).decode("utf8"))
  zlib.error: Error -5 while decompressing data: incomplete or truncated stream

which seems to imply it had a problem downloading a file or something that shouldn't be related to if its run via sudo or true root.

The debug log of that portion of the run is at https://gist.github.com/rberger/8c301ef7482c8a1794aeb7d17dbde338

Any suggestions?
Thanks!