urllib, urllib2, httplib -- Begging for consolidation?

[Jeremy Hylton]

brueckd at tbye.com wrote in message news:<mailman.1020962597.19539.python-list at python.org>...
> On 9 May 2002, Paul Boddie wrote:
> 
> > For me, what I've mostly been doing with urllib is to connect to
> > locations and to download files. Indeed, having this functionality in
> > the standard library is incredibly useful when a server
> 
> Right, and I'm not in any way advocating the elimination of this, only
> that more of the meat of the functionality be built in the corresponding
> protocol libraries (and not urllib), on top of which is built a thin,
> general-purpose API that does simple "protocol triage" if you will.

It's not at all clear that you want all possible logic associated with
processing HTTP inside httplib.  Rather, specific http-based
applications may want to use some set of the features.  Thus, I think
it's helpful to have a separation between the base protocol module and
a higher level application toolkit.

That's the rationale for having urllib and urllib2 separate from
httplib, I believe.  The rationale for having urllib2 in addition to
urllib is flexibility. urllib requires applications to get exactly one
set of features; urllib2 lets an application pick the features it
needs.

Jeremy