I've gone once more through and have some 2.4 compatible solution. It has quite a few ugly parts, but it seems to work. If there is anybody willing to test the functionality I would be glad. (CLI tests are already broken for a while for 2.4).
krbV support is not there - anyway gssapi should solve all the problems - works for me with Fedora
urlgrabber not avaiable in python3 variant - substituted with pycurl and uglier progress bar
try/except Exception, e vs Exception as e - I had to remove all of these and reacquire exception via sys.exc_info - ugly
I've gone once more through and have some 2.4 compatible solution. It has quite a few ugly parts, but it seems to work. If there is anybody willing to test the functionality I would be glad. (CLI tests are already broken for a while for 2.4).