I have encoutered really bad bugs in some Python 2.4 applications (Zope based) using the tarfile module. For instance, the TarFile.getmembers method that returns the files a tar file contains will just fail to return all files ...

Hopefully Zope will work under Python 2.5 sometimes. This is a work in progress in GSOC if I recall it correclty, but I am not sure of the current state.

Until then I just stick Python 2.5 module in my packages. It seems to work fine (tests pass :D) after a few changes as it is isolated from the rest of Python.

If you want to do it as well, there are only two changes to make it work under Python 2.4, to introduce 3 new constants in os module and to get rid of a syntax that does not work under 2.4:
$ diff /opt/local/lib/python2.5/tarfile.py tarfile.py

46a47,49

>

> os.SEEK_SET, os.SEEK_CUR, os.SEEK_END = range(3)

>

1070c1073,1076

<         self.name = os.path.abspath(name) if name else None

---

>         if name:

>             self.name = os.path.abspath(name)

>         else:

>             self.name = None