Bug?: import-tars misbehaves on Subversion tarballs

import-tars behaves very oddly when I try to import the Subversion tarballs. (For example, http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.3.tar.bz2 triggers this problem.) It creates two toplevel directories, subversion-1.4.3 and subversion-1.4.3subversion. The former seems to contain at least almost all files; the latter has only a handful of files, all with very long names.

When I unpack it with GNU tar, I get all the files under a single "subversion-1.4.3" directory, as expected.

Could it simply be that import-tars can't handle long filenames somehow? (This is pure speculation, since I know absolutely nothing about the tar format.)