Reported by Nikolaus Schaller, Sep 17, 2017

Your makesd has a problem that we recently discovered on the pyra: 
tar extraction is trying to magically convert uid/gid of all files 
to match between hosts. For example, if there is a file belonging to 
user "lightdm" uid=84 in in the tar, but the host used to 
prepare the SD is using a different distro and also has 
"lightdm" user but with different uid (108), tar will 
silently change the uid from 84 to 108, which may lead to mysterious 
permission errors when SD is actually booted. The solution is add 
--numeric-owner .

Most of the time this doesn't show up, but a few unfortunate users 
might have problems.