Hi,

d/rules has this line:

|execute_after_dh_auto_install:
|# Cut non UTF-8 bytes off to silence national-encoding Lintian warning. Regex taken from https://stackoverflow.com/a/1401716/5000805
|	find $(INCLUDE_DIR) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/((?:[\x00-\x7F]|[\xC0-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]|[\xE0-\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}|[\xF0-\xF7][\x80-\xBF]{3}){1,100})|./$$1/g'

I personally find such line in the debianization somewhat of an eyesore
every time I see it.

I wonder if it would be possible to instead forward it upstream in the
form of a proper patch?

Likewise, I think it should be trivial to get the upstream build system
to stop creating empty dirs.  (Somewhat unsure about the third one.)