No way to set a timeout in "urllib".

[John J. Lee]

John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> 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