I was thinking about giving Python a try for a small project idea I had, but I had a question: does Python have an archive abstraction module, i.e., something like libarchive in C, which can handle any of the common archive formats (tar, zip, cpio) in any of the common compression formats (gz, bzip2, and any others that I forgot...)? I did some quick googling and saw various modules for individual formats, but not an abstraction module covering all of them. I would only be necessary to read the archives and extract files from them (no archive creation) if that makes a difference.

This project looks fairly new:
http://code.google.com/p/python-libarchive/

Python extensions are very easy (but sometimes tedious) to implement, so the project would be easy to contribute to if you know C and libarchive.
Kevin Barry