Continued karma-grubbing.

My advice for the Python patches neophyte: start high. I foolishly started in the low-numbered patches (#755660) & spent over an hour trying to figure out the code (which was easy) and the various patches and counterarguments and ... That part was less easy and nowhere near as pleasant. Folks, there's a reason why those patches and bug reports have been lying around for over a year -- no one else wants to deal with them.

Another piece of advice is to stick with modules you already know about or are interested to learn about. In my case I'd just gone through the HTMLParser stuff to find the sgmllib bug, so I decided to focus on HTML/CGI/URL stuff.

Anyhoo, worked my way through 9 add'l patches. Great! Together with my comment on patch 755660, I ran through 10 different patches. I may now pray to The Gods That Be to review patch 1087808, my sgmllib fix.

Here's a list:

• patch 1055159, a simple docstring/doc patch to CGIHTTPServer. (This was really a documentation "enhancement request" masquerading as a patch, so I verified the behavior described & then wrote the doc string appropriately.)

• patch 755670, a patch to make HTMLParser parse invalid HTML. Recommended not applying it.

  (I also put in a comment that was meant for a different patch (755660). Very embarrassing. Sigh. Tabbed browsing is dangerous in my hands. ;)

• patch 1037974, a patch to fix HTTP digest authentication when accessing LiveJournal feeds (and any other feeds that don't listen to RFC 2617, which considers 'Algorithm' notification optional).

  Had to sign up for a livejournal account to test this, too...

  This is my first time dealing with digest authentication, but as I understand it the new behavior is merely verbose and a bit redundant. It certainly shouldn't break anything. Recommend apply.

• patch 1028908, a bunch of small stuff by John J. Lee of wwwsearch. Apparently much of the code he modified was originally written by him anyway (?) and the regression tests passed, so *shrug*... recommend application.

• patch 901480, fixing bug 735248. This fixes a bug in the way urllib2.parse_http_list parses unquoted elements. Recommend application, although I submitted a slightly modified patch (against the current CVS) that fixed a doctest string.

• patch 827559 fixes SimpleHTTPServer to add a trailing '/' to directory names. Recommend application; it does fix the behavior, and I think it's a reasonable way to treat directories, too.

  An analogy: Links to 'http://some.place.or.other:port' get rewritten to 'http://some.place.or.other:port/', so links to '/this/dir' should get rewritten to '/this/dir/'.

• patch 810023, a very nice patch to fix some reporthook behavior in urllib. The submitter, J. Lewis Muir, wrote regression tests to show that his new urllib worked, so testing this one was pretty easy. Recommend apply, based on the regression test behavior failed by the current source tree.

• patch 893642, which adds an optional allow_none argument to SimpleXMLRPCServer and classes that use it. I updated the patch & added some documentation.

• patch 1067760, to bug 1067728 (closed). This patch changes the behavior of seek() on file objects to do float --> long conversion instead of float --> int conversion. This allows 2.0**62 to be used in a seek, just like 2 ** 62. I recommended applying it because it shouldn't lead to new bugs. I'm probably missing something.