Comment 9 for bug 399938

This is wider than just bzr-builddeb. I'm experiencing this issue every once in a while on my x64 karmic server, doing the mozilla & chromium dailies.

$ bzr bd --merge --build-dir=/data/bot/ppa --orig-dir=../tarballs --builder='dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -S -sd -kB6EE20E8'
Building using working tree
Running in merge mode
Looking for a way to retrieve the upstream tarball
Upstream tarball already exists in build directory, using that

gzip: stdout: Broken pipe
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
bzr: ERROR: There was an error executing tar to uncompress /data/bot/ppa/chromium-browser_4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226.orig.tar.gz.
$ cd ../tarballs
$ tar ztvf chromium-browser_4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226.orig.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x fta/fta 0 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/
-rw-r--r-- fta/fta 73786421 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226-source.tar.lzma

gzip: stdout: Broken pipe
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
$ tar zxvf chromium-browser_4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226.orig.tar.gz
chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/
chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226-source.tar.lzma

gzip: stdout: Broken pipe
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

$ cp -a chromium-browser_4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226.orig.tar.gz foo.tar.gz
tar ztvf foo.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x fta/fta 0 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/
-rw-r--r-- fta/fta 73786421 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226-source.tar.lzma

gzip: stdout: Broken pipe
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
$ gunzip foo.tar.gz
$ echo $?
0
$ tar tvf foo.tar
drwxr-xr-x fta/fta 0 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/
-rw-r--r-- fta/fta 73786421 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226-source.tar.lzma
$ tar xvf foo.tar
chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/
chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226-source.tar.lzma
$ ls -l chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226/
total 72136
-rw-r--r-- 1 fta fta 73786421 2009-09-15 19:46 chromium-browser-4.0.210.0~svn20090915r26226-source.tar.lzma

If i scp this tarball to my 32bit desktop (karmic too), it's all fine.