I'm porting, embedding and extending Python in a very limited environment.

This environment does not have utime.h and have not defined the
following function:

int utime(const char *, const struct utimbuf *);

Although the function called utimes, defined in sys/time.h exist.

int utimes(const char *path, const struct timeval times[2]);


In the method, in posixmodule.c:

static PyObject *
posix_utime(PyObject *self, PyObject *args);

usage of these methods are used. If a time is specified in args, a
define determines which of the two methods to use, utime or utimes
depending if these exist or not.

If Py_None is sent instead utime is always used, the solution to solve
this is to use #ifdef with HAVE_UTIMES.

Line number 2835 in
http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Modules/posixmodule.c

I have not checked if this is solved in future versions.

It seems reasonable to prefer utimes() over utime() in all cases, when 
utimes() is available, since utime() is considered obsolete.  I've 
attached a patch with the required change and ran all the tests.  There 
are some tests failing on trunk with my system.  However this patch 
introduced no additional failures (test_posix passes).  BTW, the patch is 
against trunk.

This is no longer an issue in Python3; there utimes is used if it is available (if utimensat is not).

Since this doesn't affect the platforms actually supported by python2.7, I'm closing this as out of date.