It is a shame that dpkg-source prints an unhelpful message, but so many things with source packages are unhelpful...
I have added a new check for this in dgit, which I hope will detect and report this situation, and do so before dgit has made the situation worse by proliferating any erroneous origs. The message looks like this: dgit: multiple representations of similar orig example_1.0.orig.tar: example_1.0.orig.tar.xz: in .. (/home/ian/things/Dgit/dgit/tests/tmp/import-linkorigs/dupes) example_1.0.orig.tar.gz: in build-products-dir (/home/ian/things/Dgit/dgit/tests/tmp/import-linkorigs/dupes/example/../bpd) dgit: error: Duplicate/inconsistent orig tarballs. Delete the spurious ones. This is currently in a local branch here. Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. Pronouns: they/he. If I emailed you from @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.