[Web-SIG] Status of PEP 268

[Maas-Maarten Zeeman]

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>>It looks like no one is interested in completing/implementing/finishing
>>this PEP. Is this the case?
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>I think that the urllib, urllib2, httplib modules (and so on) really need 
>reviewing and a more coherent package structure introduced, possibly with 
>more accessible classes for cases where one needs to change the default 
>behaviour, especially in the simple cases. Perhaps there'll be a sprint at 
>EuroPython around such things...
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That sounds like a good idea. The http libraries are indeed lack 
coherence. To list a couple of problems:

* httplib can do http 1.1, but no basic or digest authentication.
* urllib2 can do basic and digest authentication, although very 
inefficiently, but no http 1.1.
* urllib2 does not know anything about http connections (I guess it was 
build for http 1.0). This makes it hard to make extensions for 
connection oriented authentication mechanisms like NTLM, Negotiate and 
Kerberos.

A sprint would really help to get things into shape again.

Regards,

Maas