I've come to the conclusion that, as written, the higher level line-
oriented protocols which use the socket library (httplib, ftplib,
xmlrpclib, etc) won't work with socket timeouts.  They generally do
something like:

    self.file = self.sock.makefile('rb')

then use file methods to send and receive data on the socket.

Alas, the socket docs state:

Timeout mode internally sets the socket in non-blocking mode.
The blocking and timeout modes are shared between file descriptors
and socket objects that refer to the same network endpoint.  A
consequence of this is that file objects returned by the makefile()
method should only be used when the socket is in blocking mode; in
timeout or non-blocking mode file operations that cannot be
completed immediately will fail.  

I view this state of affairs as a bug which should be fixed at some
point, as these higher level protocol modules are probably the 
predominant way sockets get used in Python programs.

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The attached simple patch to socket.py seems to do the trick.  No tests
fail as a result.  The new test_urllibnet test case fails on Mac OS X
without the patch and succeeds with the patch.

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If this patch is accepted: may I request it be done soon? Changes like this often affect how things work on MacOS9 (IOW: break things on MacOS9:-), and in general changing the makefile() semantics on all non-windows platforms is something that may turn up hidden bugs, so I don't think we want this in as a last-second mod before 2.3b1 goes out.

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Jack, Any chance you can simply apply it to the source and see how it goes
on MacOS9? -Skip

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This works for me on linux.  I don't know if there's any
issue wrt to removing _needwrapper.  Perhaps it should be
checked in and see if anyone complains?  I'm not sure who
else should review this patch.

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Okay, checked in and closed.  Let's see who screams.

Lib/socket.py 1.36
Lib/test/test_urllibnet.py 1.1
Misc/NEWS 1.705

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Not me. I didn't even notice this was checked in! Good job.