Ohhhhh I have dealt with this before: the problem is that debhelper (in xenial) thinks that "zlib.a" is a static library (it's trying to find files with names of the form "libXXX.a" but uses a bad regex) and feeds it to strip as part of the package build, which mangles the file.
Ohhhhh I have dealt with this before: the problem is that debhelper (in xenial) thinks that "zlib.a" is a static library (it's trying to find files with names of the form "libXXX.a" but uses a bad regex) and feeds it to strip as part of the package build, which mangles the file.