If you want help debugging a problem like this you need to provide the make rule or at least the tar command you invoked. How can we see what's wrong with the command if there's no command to see?
However, 99% of the time an error like this means that you're creating the tar file inside a directory that you're trying to put into the tar file. So, when tar tries to read the directory it finds the tar file as a member of the directory, starts to read it and write it out to the tar file, and so between the time it starts to read the tar file and when it finishes reading the tar file, the tar file has changed.
So for example something like:
tar cf ./foo.tar .
There's no way to "stop" this, because it's not wrong. Just put your tar file somewhere else when you create it, or find another way (using --exclude
or whatever) to omit the tar file.