I believe the new change to debhelper is buggy - it does not operate on all packages by default as claimed in the man page, and the -a switch was changed to depend on the build architecture. This seems illogical and not backwards compatible. However, alien should still report the failure properly.
I believe the new change to debhelper is buggy - it does not operate on all packages by default as claimed in the man page, and the -a switch was changed to depend on the build architecture. This seems illogical and not backwards compatible. However, alien should still report the failure properly.