I discovered an interesting "feature" of chmod(1), which caused a package build to fail. According to the GNU manual page, if no letters are used before a "-" or "+", "the effect is as if a were given, but bits that are set in the umask are not affected." The command will also fail with an error message when it does this!

The Single Unix Specification says this is correct, though there is some ambiguity over whether the exit status should be 0 or not.

Anyway, the result is that it is generally a bad idea to call chmod in this way in a script. Always specify who the permission changes should apply to.