Comment 6 for bug 533369

You can easily reproduce it by adding --variant=buildd to the deboostrap command. This is what pbuilder uses. The debootstrap command itself will work, but it won't have apt-get in it and therefore pbuilder or other tools which assume the presence of apt will fail.

To reproduce the failure of pbuilder, call something like sudo /usr/sbin/pbuilder --create --distribution squeeze.