Roman Donchenko authored Jul 06, 2015 and Brad King committed Jul 06, 2015

Sparse files in tars are a GNU extension that libarchive will use if it
detects holes in the input file, even when using the standard pax/paxr
formats. Not all tar implementations can handle sparse files; in particular,
the internal implementation dpkg uses to extract packages can't. To
maximize archive portability, turn this feature off by clearing the
sparseness information from archive entries.