Native debian package won't install due to make or makefile error

Discussion reproduced from mailing list:

After fixing the quote problem, I'm still getting this error from dpkg itself:

(Reading database ... 128812 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace accumulo-native 1.4.1 (using accumulo-native_1.4.1-amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement accumulo-native ...
Setting up accumulo-native (1.4.1) ...
cd: 25: can't cd to /usr/lib/accumulo/src/server/src/main/c++
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
dpkg: error processing accumulo-native (--install):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
accumulo-native

After investigating the error I've found that dpkg seems to make all the new files in directories with the suffix .dpkg-new, and then it renames them at some point. I was unable to determine via a casual google if this should happen before or after the postinst script is run, but I'm wondering if the assumption that the makefile and its dependencies will have their normal names is an error.

Either way, that shouldn't cause the cd command to fail (although it might cause the subsequent 'make' command to fail). I'm unsure at this point why cd is failing because it appears that dpkg unpacks the data.tar.gz file (although with its contents renamed), which I determined from running ls while dpkg is running.