[python-advocacy] Python makes the "most wanted list"

[Michael Foord]

Facundo Batista wrote:
> 2008/2/11, Jeff Younker <jeff at drinktomi.com>:
>
>   
>> enough.  People don't read the documentation in enough detail.  If
>> the library is leading to a problem, then the default for the library
>> needs to be changed.
>>     
>
> If we change urllib2 to start sending the "User-Agent" header by
> default, we need to address two issues here:
>
> - What we do to insert this change, as a lot of scripts that are
> actually written and working will change their behaviour.
>
> - What default to put (something like "Python 2.6.1 urllib2"?).
>
> In any case, if you're seriously suggesting this, I suggest you to
> start this discussion in python-dev.
>
> (I'm +0 for the change, btw).
>   
My understanding is that it does have a default user-agent.(that looks 
very similar to the one you suggest).

The only thing that would work (as far as I can tell), is to force the 
programmer to set an explicit user-agent rather than sending a default 
one. This would obviously break a lot of code and there is no guarantee 
that programmers would set it to anything useful...

Michael Foord



> Thanks!
>
>