When running debootstrap in Fedora 15 I get this message: # debootstrap squeeze debian-squeeze-chroot http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian E: Couldn't work out current architecture Which means I need to manually set the architecture using --arch=amd64. It would be better if debootstrap could detect the right architecture to save me typing it.
According to the debootstrap manual page, --arch= option should be used if 'dpkg' package is not installed (which is usual in Fedora). I think that this behavior is correct and we should not change it. Adding and maintaining Fedora-only patch for this issue might bring more problems than fix real ones. Anyway, you can have multiarch system with Fedora. Therefore a safe detection is complicated. And also architecture names are different in Debian and Fedora, e.g. amd64 vs x86_64. This is the reason I'm closing this bug as WONTFIX now. If you have some strong reasons for fixing this, feel free to reopen the bug.