I wish I could be as cavalier about Tk 8.5.  The last version of Tk 8.4
just came out and it really shows its age, especially on Mac OS X, and
those are ~25% of our application's downloads.  Since Python 2.6a2 is
"not suitable for production use", that leaves us with patching 2.5. 
Backporting, the _tkinter and Tkinter changes, was not hard, but then we
get "SystemError: Objects/tupleobject.c:89: bad argument to internal
function" errors with both the 2.5 and the 2.6a2 idlelibs.  Looking at
the SVN log, it is not clear which patch to tupleobject.c fixed that
problem (does anyone know?).

So fixing WidgetRedirector.py to not screw up the string representation
of tuples is the easiest solution to get idle to work with Tk 8.5. and
Python 2.5 (you still would want the Tkinter.py changes for other
reasons).  A slightly more robust solution would be to use Tcl quoting:

    r = '{%s}' % '} {'.join(map(str, r))

But that has not been important in practice.