how to prevent: rules/clean only operates warning-free only after rules/build?

[Britton <fsblk@aurora.uaf.edu>]

I notice that some packages (including one I have recently become the
maintainer of) have in rules clean a command '-$(MAKE) -i clean' to invoke
upstream's cleanup, then later dh_clean Makefile.  This is fine, except
packages that use things like imake to generate the upstream Makefile in
the first place then generate a warning message stating that the makefile
was not found if rules clean is invoked twice without a build in between.  
Packages like hello-debhelper which use autoconf have the same sort of
trouble except in this case the -$(MAKE) distclean causes the problems for
its own future invocations by removing the Makefile itself. Packages which
do a lot of cleaning before building generate this sort of error any time
they are built after a manual clean.

I guess this is acceptable behavior since hello does it but I don't like
it.  Is there any clean way to prevent this without explicitly testing for
the existence of the Makefile in question (awkward)?

Britton