I discovered much to my chagrin today that the socket module's new timeout capability doesn't play well with file objects as returned by a socket's makefile method.
Can you explain better how it doesn't work?
Tim O'Malley's timeoutsocket module avoids this problem by implementing a simple file-like object directly on top of the socket without calling makefile(). Is there some reason this approach wasn't adopted when adding timeouts to the socket module?
I guess nobody thought of this so far.
I would think the greatest use of timeouts would be using higher-level line-oriented modules like urllib and ftplib. In addition, since makefile() isn't always available, it seems worthwhile to implement something in socket.py, thus making makefile() universally available.
Um, when is makefile() not available? There's code for Windows that emulates it, returning a file-like object. Maybe that code should be enabled universally rather than only on Windows...
I filed a bug report about this issue earlier today in case people are interested:
http://www.python.org/sf/707074
I'm interested, but have no time... :-(
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)