[issue18417] urlopen() has a hidden default for its timeout argument

[R. David Murray]

R. David Murray added the comment:

OK, I reviewed the issue enough to remember:  If socket.setdefaulttimeout is never called, then the default timeout is None (no timeout).  Since socket.setdefaulttimeout is deprecated, the global default should always be None.  Therefore, if you want to use the "default" timeout in a new application, you could pass None as the value for timeout...but of course that probably doesn't do what you want.  What you *really* want to do is pass the default timeout value being used by your application, whatever that is, managed however your application/library manages it.

If you are writing a library that for some reason wants to retain backward compatibility with setdefaulttimeout (and I think you probably shouldn't be), you could call getdefaulttimeout to get the current default value.  Since urlopen is creating a new socket object, this should have the correct semantics.

Mind, I don't claim that there can't be a better solution, I'm just trying to explain the current state of affairs as I understand it.  However, aside from the ugliness of the current signature for urlopen, at the moment it seems reasonable to me :)

That said, this argument is premised firmly on setdefaulttimeout being deprecated, and there is currently no indication of that in its documentation that I can see.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue18417>
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