Bug#46716: dpkg: fails to install inews, ./ error?

[Joey Hess <joey@varesearch.com>]

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.4.1.13
Severity: normal


Unpacking inewsinn (from .../inewsinn_1.7.2-11_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/inewsinn_1.7.2-11_i386.deb
(--unpack):
 unable to create ./usr/bin/inews': No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/inewsinn_1.7.2-11_i386.deb

The package contains:

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 1999-09-06 12:40:22 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-sr-x root/news     37252 1999-09-06 12:40:22 ./usr/bin/inews

Which looks fine to me. Has the change in tar somehow broken dpkg?

-- System Information
Debian Release: potato
Kernel Version: Linux gumdrop 2.2.12 #1 SMP Wed Sep 22 16:18:39 PDT 1999 i686 unknown

Versions of the packages dpkg depends on:
ii  libc6           2.1.2-5        GNU C Library: Shared libraries and timezone
ii  libncurses4     4.2-3.3        Shared libraries for terminal handling
ii  libstdc++2.10   2.95.2-0pre2   The GNU stdc++ library