woes installing Puppet server (won't start)

[Peter Berghold]

I've been running my own personal Puppet server at home for a very long time and have rebuilt and installed Puppet server many times so what is going on now makes no sense to me.

Yesterday I decided to rebuild my Puppet master yet again and loaded the puppetserver package from:

puppetlabs-release-pc1-xenial.deb

puppet5-release-xenial.deb

puppet5-release-stretch.deb

puppet5-nightly-release-stretch.deb

In that order.

I'm running on Ubuntu (14?) and in none of the above versions does the puppetserver process start up and stay up.  Gleaning the journal  (journalctl -u puppetserver --follow) I find this little nugget of fun:

Jul 20 06:13:03 myserver.tld  puppetserver[24046]: 06:13:03.762 [main] ERROR puppetlabs.trapperkeeper.internal - Error during app buildup!

Jul 20 06:13:03 mysever.tld puppetserver[24046]: java.lang.RuntimeException: Service ':FilesystemWatchService' not found

What the heck is that about?  What do I need to do to fix this?  

Thanks in advance.