I was responding to a question on c.l.py earlier about
urllib hanging and was reminded of Tim O'Malley's
timeoutsocket.py.  It's a shim above socket that allows
you to set timeouts on any TCP connections.  Back in
January, Jeff Bauer suggested in c.l.py that it be
included in the core.  I agree that it provides useful
extra functionality beyond the current socket
implementation and would like it to be considered for
addition to the standard distribution.  Here's a
pointer:

    http://www.timo-tasi.org/python/timeoutsocket.py

Here's how you use it:

    import timeoutsocket
    import httplib
    timeoutsocket.setDefaultSocketTimeout(20)
    # at this point any sockets created
    # will have a 20-second timeout
    h = httplib.HTTP("www.python.org")

Pretty simple, huh?

Skip

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I like this idea, but don't think this exact implementation
belongs in the standard library. The hacks deployed to
"install" the special effect are a bit fragile, e.g.
consider "import socket as foo"; and they shouldn't be
necessary.

When integrated into the standard library, it should
probably become a standard feature of the socket object.
Note that on Windows, socket.socket is already a shim on top
of _socket.socket, so that would be a convenient starting
point.

Patch anyone?

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Skip, want to work on this? If not, please unassign it.

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While the offer is tempting, I almost certainly don't
understand the various bits associated with sockets and
don't have the time to learn them, so I'm unassigning.
Hopefully someone else will pick it up for 2.3...

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I'd be interested in integrating the two modules if no one
has tackled this yet. Seems like it would make a cool
feature.

I'm a little unclear on where you think the best integration
(and I'm a little new to the interpreter source :) ) point
would be - in the python module interface socket.py or the
lower level c interface socketmodule.c.

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Bernard Yue is considering to tackle this. See the thread in
python-dev starting at
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023278.html
Maybe you two can work on this together?

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Check the python-dev mailing list archive for the past few
days.  There is an active thread about this topic.

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For the record, I have a patch. I'm coordinating with
Bernard Yue for some preliminary testing and it'll added
into the patch tracker shortly.

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A patch for this now exists in the SF tracker: #555085.

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I think this is done and can be closed now, but Guido's been
working on this and knows the current status.

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Closing. Further discussion at the corresponding patch.