* Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>, 2012-01-05, 18:10:
seems like this entry in debian/rules fixed it :) clean: rm -fr debian/files dh_clean*NO* !!! :) You really need the dh_testdir and dh_testroot calls.
dh_testdir and dh_testroot act only as extra safety nets. Their use is certainly not mandatory.
In case of the clean target, it could be argued that dh_testroot does more harm than good.
Using dh_testroot in binary* targets is certainly a good idea. It usually takes significant amount of time to run these targets and they always do require (fake)root privileges, so it's better to fail early if the target was accidentally run as normal user.
However, this is not the case for the clean target: it's usually not time-consuming, and there's a good chance that it runs correctly even without (fake)root privileges.
-- Jakub Wilk