Re: No way to set a timeout in "urllib".

John Nagle <nagle@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

There's no way to set a timeout if you use "urllib" to open a URL.
"HTTP", which "urllib" uses, supports this, but the functionality
is lost at the "urllib" level.

It's not available via "class URLopener" or "FancyURLopener", either.

There is a non-thread-safe workaround from 2003 at

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2003-September/020405.html

but it was rejected as a feature at

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=803634&group_id=5470

without anything better going in. Despite this, current documentation
recommends that approach:

http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Doc/howto/urllib2.rst

And...? What specifically are you complaining about?

Just as a matter of fact (I'm not grumpy about it): I see from your
message that you already know that there is not a shortage of people
who spot the lack of this kind of feature. The shortage is of people
who will actually do the job of adding the feature -- most
importantly, people who will contribute high quality patches,
including tests and docs, and people who will review other people's
patches.


Someone proposed to fix this

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-July/066967.html

but was discouraged from doing so.
[...]

While it might be discouraging to be confronted with tiresome
realities of schedules and resources, those are the realities.

The flip side is that you can make a real difference by putting in
some work.

Looking forward to your patch :-)


John
.