[Python-Dev] Adding timeout to socket.py and httplib.py (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Mar 22 15:41:20 CET 2007

On 3/22/07, Alan Kennedy <python-dev at alan.kennedy.name> wrote:

[Alan] >> - Explicitly check that the address passed is a tuple of (string, integer)

[Facundo] > In the code, I'll just make "host, port = address", I don't think it > will be a problem at all. Remember that this function primary use is for > higher level libraries, and that "address" in socket enviroment is > always, always, (host, port). It's rather unfortunate that the tuple needs to be unpacked at all.

Why?

Instead, it should be possible to simply pass the address tuple directly to the socsket.getaddrinfo() function, and let it worry about the tuple-ness of the address, raising exceptions accordingly.

The socket.getaddrinfo() function, unlike every other python socket function, takes separate host and port parameters. Which forces every user of the socket.getaddrinfo function to do the same unnecessary and potentially error-prone address tuple unpacking. I have raised a feature request to change this. [1685962] socket.getaddrinfo() should take an address tuple.

It's unlikely to be granted. Getaddrinfo(), like gethostname() and a few other things, lives at a different abstraction level than the basic socket object; it is only relevant for IP sockets, not for other types of addresses. The Python call just wraps the system call which has a similar API. While from a purist POV you might want to move all IP-related APIs out of the "pure" socket module (and this would include SSL), in practice, nobody cares.

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

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