The body of pkg_setup should be wrapped around a: if [ "${MERGE_TYPE}" != "binary" ]; then ... fi
fixed in current stable, 15, by what you said in Comment #0, using MERGE_TYPE and fixed in 16 and 9999 by completely dropping the offensive code, as upstream fixed the problem it was for: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/kernel/kmod/kmod.git/patch/?id=dc8ed09f8f21d17ef9481001683d7edfdb308983