What is it about Python that makes developers love fragmentation so much? Sending HTTP requests is a basic capability in the modern world, the standard library should include a friendly, fully-featured, battle-tested, async-ready client. But not in Python, stdlib only has the ugly urllib.request, and everyone is using third party stuff like requests or httpx, which aren't always well maintained. (See also: packaging)

> Then I found out it was broken. I contributed a fix. The fix was ignored and there was never any release since November 2024.

This seems like a pretty good reason to fork to me.

> Sending HTTP requests is a basic capability in the modern world, the standard library should include a friendly, fully-featured, battle-tested, async-ready client. But not in Python,

Or Javascript (well node), or golang (http/net is _worse_ than urllib IMO), Rust , Java (UrlRequest is the same as python's), even dotnet's HttpClient is... fine.

Honestly the thing that consistently surprises me is that requests hasn't been standardised and brought into the standard library

Your java knowledge is outdated. Java's JDK has a nice, modern HTTP Client https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.net....

>Honestly the thing that consistently surprises me is that requests hasn't been standardised and brought into the standard library

Instead, official documentation seems comfortable with recommending a third party package: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html#module...

>The Requests package is recommended for a higher-level HTTP client interface.

Which was fine when requests were the de-facto-standard only player in town, but at some point modern problems (async, http2) required modern solutions (httpx) and thus ecosystem fragmentation began.

Node now supports the Fetch API.

I'm not a lawyer, but are there any potential trademark issues? AFAIK in general you HAVE to change the name to something clearly different. I consider it morally OK, and it's probably fine, but HTTPXYZ is cutting it close. It's too late for a rebrand, but IMO open-source people often ignore this topic a bit too much.

Don't you need to register and actively defend you trademark for it to apply?

Is httpx trademarked? I couldn't find anything indicating it was.

I don't think HTTPX is a registered trademark.

He would probably win in a legal case, but is he actually going to take it to court? I doubt it. Also I wouldn't be too offended about the name if I were him and for users it's better because it makes the link clearer.

I think if had named it HTTPX2 or HTTPY, that would be much worse because it asserts superiority without earning it. But he didn't.

the http landscape is rather scary lately in Python. instead of forking join forces... See Niquests https://github.com/jawah/niquests

I am trying to resolve what you've seen. For years of hard work.

Is it knee-quests or nigh-quests?

I've started seeing these emoji-prefixed commits lately now too, peculiar

There is a series of extensions for Vscode that add this functionality like https://github.com/ugi-dev/better-commits

ah ok, I am familiar with and not exactly against (non-emoji) commit message prefixes

it's the gitmoji thing, I really don't like it, it was a mistake. Thinking to stop it soon. I was inspired by fastapi in the early days. I prefer conventionalcommits.org

Please don't be too much inspired by FastAPI - at least regarding maintainer bus factor and documentation (FastAPI docs are essentially tutorial only), and requiring dozens of hoops to jump through to even open an issue.

nee-quests, I am French native.

I guess kind of obvious now noticing the rhyme

It is indeed a shame that niquests isn't used more, I think trying to use the (c'est Français) argument to in French will bring you many initial users needed for the inertia

ahah, "en effet"! je m'en souviendrai.

more seriously, all that is needed is our collective effort. I've done my part by scarifying a lot of personal time for it.

The basis of httpx is not very good at all.

I think that it owes its success to be first "port" of python requests to support async, that was a strong need.

But otherwise it is bad: API is not that great, performance is not that great, tweaking is not that great, and the maintainer mindset is not that great also. For the last point, few points were referenced in the article, but it can easily put your production project to suddenly break in a bad way without valid reason.

Without being perfect, I would advise everyone to switch to Aiohttp.

aiohttp is an excellent library. very stable. I concurs, but! it's too heavily tied to HTTP/1, and well, I am not a fan of opening thousands of TCP conn just to keep up with HTTP/2 onward. niquests easily beat aiohttp just using 10 conn and crush httpx see https://gist.github.com/Ousret/9e99b07e66eec48ccea5811775ec1...

fwiw, HTTP/2 is twelve years old, just saying.

aiohttp is for asynchronous contexts only

Can confirm, more features, a breeze to switch.

Congratulations on forking!

Always remember that open-source is an author’s gift to the world, and the author doesn’t owe anything to anyone. Thus, if you need a feature that for whatever reason can’t or won’t go upstream, forking is just about the only viable option. Fingers crossed!

I guess the Discussion on Hacker News href should be "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514603" instead of "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514603"

Somehow I confused httpx with htmlx

I guess you mean htmx. Same here. I read the article for a while, and was confused by "HTTPX is a very popular HTTP client for Python." and wondering "why is OpenAI using htmx", until I eventually realized what's going on.

And also htmlx with htmx I guess?

Same! Only just realized it thanks to your comment.

The lack of a well-maintained async HTTP client in Python's stdlib has been a pain point for a while. Makes sense someone eventually took it into their own hands

More related drama: The Slow Collapse of MkDocs (https://fpgmaas.com/blog/collapse-of-mkdocs/)

>thread to call out Read the Docs for profiting from MkDocs without contributing back.

>They also point out that not opening up the source code goes against the principles of Open Source software development

I will never stop being amused when people have feelings like this and also choose licenses like BSD (this project). If you wanted a culture that discouraged those behaviors, why would you choose a license that explicitly allows them? Whether you can enforce it or not, the license is basically a type of CoC that states the type of community you want to have.

Oh i recognised one of the involved people immediately, drama person.

I still think that hijacking the mkdocs package was the wrong way to go though.

The foss landscape has become way too much fork-phobic.

Just fork mkdocs and go over your merry way.

Drama around Starlette. Drama around httpx. Drama around MkDocs. I just hope that DRF is not next, I still have some projects that depend on it.

What's the drama around starlette? (Can't find anything)

Good line from the blog post ...

"So what is the plan now?" - "Move a little faster and not break things"

> Visitor 4209 since we started counting

Loved that little detail, reminds me of the old interwebs :)

smells like supply chain attack

It's a shame, httpx has so much potential to be the default Python http library. It's crazy that there isn't one really. I contributed some patches to the project some years ago now and it was a nice and friendly process. I was expecting a v1 release imminently. It looks like the author is having some issues which seem to afflict so many in this field for some reason. I notice they've changed their name since I last interacted with the project...

Hi Michiel!

Just a small headsup: clicking on the Leiden Python link in your About Me page give not the expected results.

And a small nitpick: it's "Michiel's" in English (where it's "Michiels" in Dutch).

Thanks for devoting time to opensource... <3