This bug seems to be related to http://bugs.python.org/issue13158

When I try to run the following code:

import tarfile

tf = tarfile.open("kdelibs-4.7.3.tar.bz2", "r")
print(len(tf.getnames()))

against this tarball: http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/other/kdelibs-4.7.3.tar.bz2 it will output 150 members. This is not enough and other tools like 7zip or bsdtar report a lot more (should be around 9237).

Some testing reveals that the bz2 module < 3.3 cannot fully decompress the file in question. Only the first 900k are decompressed. Thus, this issue is not related to issue13158 or the tarfile module.

Isn't this a duplicate of issue #1625?

The tarfile module documentation needs a note similar to issue1625 which would warn about the lack of supporting some files and suggest a workaround.

This is no longer reproducible under 3.7.0.

>>> import tarfile
>>> tf = tarfile.open("kdelibs-4.7.3.tar.bz2", "r")
>>> print(len(tf.getnames()))
9237

Not sure I should be the one closing this.

This is a 2.7 only documentation issue.

Sorry, you are right. I'll try on 2.7 when I get home, and make a PR if needed.

New changeset 8d3b0f49021e6cd25030a1eb979218cfceb44061 by Brian Curtin (Andrés Delfino) in branch '2.7':
[2.7] bpo-13407: Mention that bz2/tarfile doesn't support multi-stream bzip2 files (GH-8428)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/8d3b0f49021e6cd25030a1eb979218cfceb44061

I believe this can be closed.