Cowdancer is activly developed in debian, that's very nice. it's really a cool tool to build packages for unstable but also for backporting efforts. I'm using it on a daily basis to build debian etch packages of lustre. However three days ago cowdancer stopped working with my etch chroot after an upgrade of my unstable system:

dpkg-source: info: building lustre in lustre_1.6.5~rc3-1.dsc
dpkg-genchanges -S >../lustre_1.6.5~rc3-1_source.changes
dpkg-genchanges: including full source code in upload
dpkg-buildpackage: source only upload (original source is included)
chroot: cannot run command `cowdancer-ilistcreate': No such file or directory
W: cowdancer-ilistcreate failed to run within chroot, falling back to old method
 -> Running in no-targz mode
I: using fakeroot in build.
Current time: Sat May 17 12:18:30 CEST 2008
pbuilder-time-stamp: 1211019510
 -> copying local configuration
 -> mounting /proc filesystem
 -> mounting /dev/pts filesystem
 -> policy-rc.d already exists
Obtaining the cached apt archive contents
Installing the build-deps
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
Can't open perl script "/usr/bin/dpkg-architecture": Cannot allocate memory
 -> Attempting to satisfy build-dependencies
 -> Creating pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy package
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
sh: /tmp/satisfydepends-aptitude/pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy/DEBIAN/control: Cannot allocate memory
E: pbuilder-satisfydepends failed.
Copying back the cached apt archive contents
 -> unmounting dev/pts filesystem
 -> unmounting proc filesystem
 -> Copying COW directory
 -> Invoking pbuilder
 -> Cleaning COW directory
Command /bin/sh -c pdebuild "--pbuilder" "cowbuilder" "--" "--basepath" "/var/cache/pbuilder/etch.cow" failed

After some research I found that a change of cowdancer (something related to .ilist) is responible for this issue. After that I asked on #debian-devel if someone else had this problem and were told that removing an re-creating the chroot will help. But that results in the same error msg. After that I decided to wrote a bugreport against cowdancer, since this is in my eyes a major defect in this software to do not support the latest stable release. I filled this report as RC Bug and got very fast a answer:

severity 481344 wishlist
retitle 481344  provide cowdancer etch backport
[ ... ]

I think this is the wrong way to fix a problem in unstable with a backport of a software. Providing a fallback for older debian releases would be the better way. Is anybody else having this problems?