What does "premature member" mean?

1

I used command

sudo dpkg -x paho-mqtt-c-dev_1.3.0-r0_armhf.deb

and got error message:

dpkg-deb: error: archive 'paho-mqtt-c-dev_1.3.0-r0_armhf.deb' has 
premature member 'control.tar.xz' before 'control.tar.gz', giving up

How come?

2

You can try to reinstall dpkg:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall dpkg