Harish, we had the same problem in ooo-build. By default automake runs tar with the -o option to create archives in V7 format which allows only filenames up to 99 characters. You didn’t use -o in your manual tar invocation, so that one worked fine.
To solve this problem, we added tar-ustar to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.in (you have to use the one-argument form of AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE). With this option automake will create files in ustar format that allows filenames up to 256 characters. Note that this option is only available in automake 1.9 and later.
