Guido> I recently needed to access an HTTP URL with a timeout. I ended Guido> up monkey-patching httplib.HTTPConnection so that the connect() Guido> method has an optional second paramer, timeout, defaulting to Guido> None; if not None, a call to settimeout() is added right after Guido> successful creation of the socket. Guido> Does anybody else think this is a good idea? In principle it's probably a fine idea. We should consider if it's possible to develop a uniform approach to timeouts for all the libraries that use sockets though. Otherwise you run the risk of doing it in different ways for different libraries and having to make a (small, but annoying) semantic leap when going from, say, httplib to smtpllib or ftplib. Skip