Repro steps:

Download http://appropriatesoftware.net/provide/docs/eternity-0.13.tar.gz (via 'eternity' module in PyPI) and look at the following command line session:

C:\Temp\tfbug>python27 -c "import tarfile as T; T.open('eternity-0.13.tar.gz').extractall()"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tarfile.py", line 2046, in extractall
    self.extract(tarinfo, path)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tarfile.py", line 2083, in extract
    self._extract_member(tarinfo, os.path.join(path, tarinfo.name))
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tarfile.py", line 2168, in _extract_member
    self.makelink(tarinfo, targetpath)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tarfile.py", line 2260, in makelink
    raise IOError("link could not be created")
IOError: link could not be created

C:\Temp\tfbug>python26 -c "import tarfile as T; T.open('eternity-0.13.tar.gz').extractall()"

C:\Temp\tfbug>dir eternity-0.13
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 1877-E6BA

 Directory of C:\Temp\tfbug\eternity-0.13

10/14/2008  06:08 PM    <DIR>          .
10/14/2008  06:08 PM    <DIR>          ..
09/05/2008  01:31 PM               115 AUTHORS
10/14/2008  06:08 PM    <DIR>          bin
09/05/2008  01:31 PM                 0 CHANGES
09/05/2008  01:31 PM            17,998 COPYING
10/14/2008  06:08 PM    <DIR>          etc
09/05/2008  01:31 PM               447 INSTALL
09/11/2008  06:06 PM               231 MANIFEST.in
10/14/2008  06:08 PM               802 PKG-INFO
09/05/2008  01:31 PM               516 README
09/10/2008  04:10 PM             2,948 setup.py
10/14/2008  06:08 PM    <DIR>          src
               8 File(s)         23,057 bytes
               5 Dir(s)   3,493,781,504 bytes free

C:\Temp\tfbug>

The actual exception caught (before it was ignored and a generic IOError was thrown) was this:

  File "C:\Python27\lib\tarfile.py", line 2168, in _extract_member
    self.makelink(tarinfo, targetpath)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tarfile.py", line 2258, in makelink
    shutil.copy2(linkpath, targetpath)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\shutil.py", line 127, in copy2
    copyfile(src, dst)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\shutil.py", line 81, in copyfile
    with open(src, 'rb') as fsrc:
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'eternity-0.13\\src\\eternity\\django\\templates\\eui\\concerns\\..\\registry\\delet
e.html'

The specified file actually does not exist. Perhaps, in the middle of the extraction process, it was not created *yet*.

Aside: why is the original exception ignored, and instead a generic IOError is thrown? Why not use one of the exceptions inheriting `TarError`, so that application code can reliably catch these errors?

This is a platform specific bug. It is happening only on windows.
BTW, makelink should not have been called for this file, because it
is not a link or symlink, but a regular file.

@senthil: Yes, this is a platform-specific problem. The code that is failing is in fact supposed to somehow "emulate" symlink and hardlink extraction on platforms that don't support these, e.g. Windows. What tarfile is trying to do here is to extract links as if they were regular files.

@sridhar: Thanks for the detailed report. I am currently working on the problem.

Thanks - just a suggestion: it may be a good idea to add a test case for this makelink emulation code.

Also, any thoughts on raising (a derived class of) TarError instead of IOError?

I have just committed the fix. I hope that this code is now more robust. See r81667 (trunk) and r81670 (py3k).

Thank you very much for your report!