Hi, Sorry I misfiled this bug against debhelper, this has now been fixed.
In short there seems to be a bunch of cruft associated with the devices.tar.gz file which used to be used by the second stage to set up devices in the bootstrapped chroot. This manifests itself if you run the script from a SCM checkout without first doing a root based build (which only works on Debian anyway). In my case I fixed this by simply making cp || true although I guess there is a bigger argument for properly excising the code as it is now longer used AFAICT, see the main script: if true; then setup_devices_simple elif [ -e "$DEVICES_TARGZ" ]; then zcat "$DEVICES_TARGZ" | (cd "$TARGET"; tar -xf -) else error 1 NODEVTGZ "no %s. cannot create devices" "$DEVICES_TARGZ" fi Sorry for the additional bug noise. -- Alex Bennée