So... pmake claims to be "BSD 4.4 make", and in fact appears to be a not- unreasonable copy of the NetBSD make sources. Is there any particular reason that the make-bsd and netbsd-mk packages in the chroot can't be replaced by the Debian-standard pmake package, if it gets updated (it's a few revisions behind, it looks like, but that's a wishlist bug for the author and easy to patch against for us).
i don't know how you're building anything, but it's not exactly uncommon for a modern netbsd make to be required to build it. that's why the first thing our shiny new src/build.sh does it build a copy of src/usr.bin/make without using make :-)
