Comment 11 for bug 161760

1) For the target its not just the semi-colon, its the target name too (see my post above).
2) Contrary to Chris, I don't think we should delete the .install file (extensions are not moved automatically by dh_pycentral).
3) In my post above, I was talking about removing python-all-dev from the build-depends, I didn't even noticed it was also in some dependency. You should really ask Jay if these are all needed as dependencies of libvips-dev: python-all-dev, python-central, python-dev (>= 2.4)
4) For the ftbfs, the problem seems to be that the name of the package is taken as "vips-7.12.5 move", see for instance this:

mkdir -p "build-tree/vips-7.12.5 move"

I would say that DEB_BUILDDIR is not constructed correctly, and I suspect that this has to do with tarball.mk, in particular the way DEB_TAR_SRCDIR is defined. If you look in rules you will see that VERSION is the result of a dpkg-parsechangelog call.
It is possible that this is the cause of the failure (please confirm). What happens if you change it with this:

dpkg-parsechangelog | sed 's/^Version: //; t; d'

?