Autotools - tar This does not look like a tar archive

Question

After running make distcheck I get the message that I have successfully built the package and is ready for distribution. If I untar the tar.gz with

Answer 1

The problem is not on the build machine; the problem is on the target machines.

Not all versions of tar automatically recognize the decompression to apply to a compressed tar file. Given that gunzip followed by tar does work, then the tar on your target machine is one such. The versions of tar on the mainstream Unix systems (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) do not recognize compressed tar files automatically. Those on Linux and MacOS X do.

Note that you can use:

gzip -dc hello-0.2.tar.gz | tar -xf -

to avoid creating the intermediate uncompressed file.