[New-bugs-announce] [issue7155] urllib2 and python 3 urllib do not document default use of system proxy configuration

[Ned Deily]

New submission from Ned Deily <nad at acm.org>:

Several issues with urllib/urllib2 documentation regarding proxy usage:

1. The Macintosh proxy description in section 21.5.1 is out-of-date:

    "In a Macintosh environment, urlopen() will retrieve
     proxy information from Internet Config."

   Suggest something like:

    "In a Mac OS X environment, urlopen() will retrieve
     proxy information from the OS X System Configuration
     framework, which can be managed with the Network system
     preference panel." 

2. In general, urllib/urllib2 on Python 2 and urllib.request on Python 3
   are supposed to default to using the OS's proxy configuration on 
   Windows and OS X if not overridden by environment variables or
   if not supplied as an argument.  This is described in python 2 docs
   section 21.5.1. urllib2 has the same default behavior since under the
   covers it uses urllib's proxy functions.  But that behavior is not
   documented in 21.6 for urllib2 in the various spots where proxy is
   mentioned.

3. Likewise, the corresponding sections of the Python 3 documentation
   for urllib.request (section 20.5) do not mention the default system
   proxy configuration behavior and should since that code was carried
   over from Python 2 (although, at the moment, the OS X code is broken
   - see Issue7154).

----------
assignee: georg.brandl
components: Documentation
messages: 94155
nosy: georg.brandl, ned.deily
severity: normal
status: open
title: urllib2 and python 3 urllib do not document default use of system proxy configuration
versions: Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.1, Python 3.2

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue7155>
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