You are right, the file was downloaded from github, and files gives, picca@cush:~/Debian/tango$ file tango-9.3.4-rc2.tar.gz tango-9.3.4-rc2.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from FAT filesystem (MS-DOS, OS/2, NT), original size 284221440
once repack with tar picca@cush:~/Debian/tango$ file tango-9.3.4-rc2.tar.xz tango-9.3.4-rc2.tar.xz: XZ compressed data it works perfectly picca@cush:~/Debian/tango/tango$ mk-origtargz --package tango --version 9.3.4~rc2 --repack-suffix +dfsg1 --compression default --directory .. --copyright-file debian/copyright ../tango-9.3.4-rc2.tar.xz Successfully repacked ../tango-9.3.4-rc2.tar.xz as ../tango_9.3.4~rc2+dfsg1.orig.tar.xz, deleting 472 files from it.
