I think we should wrap this up as soon as possible, because it has already absorbed too much of our time. The issue we discuss here is a tiny glitch triggered by a corner-case. My original idea was to fix it in a minimal sort of way that is backwards-compatible.

There are at least 4 different solutions now:

1. Keep the patch.
2. Revert the patch, leave everything as it was as wontfix.
3. Don't write an FNAME field at all if the filename that is passed is a unicode string.
4. Rewrite the FNAME code the way Terry suggests. This seems to me like the most complex solution, because we have to fix gzip.py as well, because the code in question was originally taken from the gzip module. (BTW, both the tarfile and gzip module discard the FNAME field when a file is opened for reading.)

My favorites are 1 and 3 ;-)