dpkg-genchanges and fileslistfile

[Niall Young <niall@rave.iinet.net.au>]

I'm packaging up Device::SerialPort from CPAN (for my own
use), and have been banging my head against this wall:

niall@host:~/Device-SerialPort/Device-SerialPort-0.10$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
...
 dpkg-genchanges
dpkg-genchanges: failure: cannot read files list file: No such file or directory

I've created a files list, tarred it up with the source, but it
seems to disappear each time.  Manually specifying an alternate file
results in:

niall@host:~/Device-SerialPort/Device-SerialPort-0.10$ dpkg-genchanges -fdebian/Device-SerialPort.files 
dpkg-genchanges: error: badly formed line in files list file, line 1

whose contents is:

etc
etc/Device
usr
usr/lib
usr/lib/perl5
usr/lib/perl5/5.005
usr/lib/perl5/5.005/util-linux
usr/local
usr/local/lib
usr/local/lib/site_perl
usr/local/lib/site_perl/i386-linux

What am I doing wrong?  Is there a utility to generate a fileslistfile
or am I just going about this the wrong way?

-- 
Niall Young
niall@staff.iinet.net.au