[Pythonmac-SIG] tarfile fails silently on 10.4?

[Nir Soffer]

I used to use tarfile on 10.3 to extract a bz2 compressed tarball. I  
tried the code today on 10.4, and untaring fail silently after about  
5% of tarball content, without any error.

This is the failing code:

         tar = tarfile.open(os.path.join(SHARE, 'underlay.tar.bz2'),  
mode='r:bz2')
         for member in tar:
             tar.extract(member, WIKI)
         tar.close()

The tarball contains 794 pages, but this code will extract only 47  
pages. Again, this used to work correctly about 1 year ago with 10.3.7.

The tarball is ok, I can extract the content using tar xjf tarball,  
and I even recreated the tarball again with same results.

Same behavior with builtin Python 2.3.5, and Python 2.4.3 from MacPorts.

We used this code instead of using tar command line tool, becaue it  
has to run on multiple platforms. After wasting too much time on  
stupid differences between bsd tar and gnu tar, we simply moved to  
python only solution, which worked great.


Best Regards,

Nir Soffer