> How would a resolution to this bug look like from your point of view? An extra line in the error message that reiterates that "dh clean" runs outside the chroot, and needs manual Build-Depends would be sufficient I think. Then the user knows it's not a bug, and can go read the manpage for more detail.
Even better (but more work) would be to identify the missing package. It's almost always dh-SOMETHING. Is it easy to grep the Build-Depends for all packages that match ^dh-.*, and say "try installing THIS and THAT"?