Comment 2 for bug 516293

I believe the problem is line 53 in debian/rules:

    install -p -m 644 etc/* debian/tmp/etc

What's in the etc/ subdirectory of the deb source tree?

root@test-ubuntu:/tmp/base-files-5.0.0ubuntu13# ls etc/
00-header debian_version issue legal motd
10-help-text host.conf issue.net lsb-release