[Python-Dev] Adding socket timeout to urllib2

[Guido van Rossum]

On 3/6/07, Adam Olsen <rhamph at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/6/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > On 3/6/07, Facundo Batista <facundo at taniquetil.com.ar> wrote:
> > > Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > >
> > > >> - I'll modify urlopen for it to accept a socket_timeout parameter,
> > > >> default to None
> > > >
> > > > I'd call it timeout. There can't really be much ambiguity can there?
> > >
> > > Yes and no. For example, if I do a
> > > ``urllib2.urlopen("ftp://ftp.myhome.com.ar/blah.txt", timeout=10)``, the
> > > timeout is about the socket or about the file transfer?
> >
> > Think of it this way. "Timeout" doesn't mean the whole thing needs to
> > be completed in 10 secs. It means that over 10 secs of no activity
> > causes it to be aborted.
>
> IOW, It's an idle timeout.

That's not in wikipedia. :-)

It's the only timeout that is available to us, realistically; the
socket module calls it timeout everywhere. So I think that should be a
good name for it. The argument name doesn't need to server as complete
documentation. I don't expect we'll ever see another kind of timeout
added to this same API, and if we do, we'll just have to pick a
different name for it. ;-)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)