Hi! I arrived to this bug because of the --format error which I was seing when trying to backport something for Jessie, it looked just like this bug but this bug didn't solve anything and I had build previously from Buster for Jessie, so I thought I had to have another look at the build.
It resulted that I had some dependencies problem and fixing the Control file changing the dependencies there made the build work. I'm not saying this was the case of the original submitter and maybe there is really a bug there, but maybe it can be avoided, like in my case, by setting the good dependencies for building for that distro or similar. Regards. -- Manty/BestiaTester -> http://manty.net
