When I download the the 0.9.0 release off of the web page, it seems that its a gziped gzip file. I had to do the following to untar it.
$ file thrift-0.9.0.tar.gz thrift-0.9.0.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix $ gunzip thrift-0.9.0.tar.gz $ file thrift-0.9.0.tar thrift-0.9.0.tar: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Thu Oct 11 21:01:00 2012, max compression mv thrift-0.9.0.tar thrift-0.9.0.tar.gz gunzip thrift-0.9.0.tar.gz $ file thrift-0.9.0.tar thrift-0.9.0.tar: POSIX tar archive Keith
