I encountered this error message in Windows, and was unable to proceed with deploying an application to my phone. Since this is the first result on Google, I'm adding what worked for me here, in case it can help someone else.

In my environment, Qt Creator was attempting to package application_0.1, a file that did not exist after a build. I created a custom build step for packaging that did cmd /c copy c:\path\to\application c:\path\to\application_0.1 and this has caused the packaging step to work flawlessly for me since.

Hopefully this helps someone else having an issue with failing on dh_make -s -n -p