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Why I forked httpx

https://tildeweb.nl/~michiel/httpxyz.html
79•roywashere•1h ago

Comments

swiftcoder•1h ago
Somehow I confused httpx with htmlx
croemer•1h ago
Same! Only just realized it thanks to your comment.
eknkc•54m ago
And also htmlx with htmx I guess?
g947o•31m ago
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.
globular-toast•1h ago
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...
mesahm•1h ago
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.

Orelus•1h ago
Can confirm, more features, a breeze to switch.
greatgib•59m ago
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.

mesahm•53m ago
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.

sammy2255•53m ago
aiohttp is for asynchronous contexts only
u_sama•51m ago
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
mesahm•47m ago
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.

duskdozer•44m ago
Is it knee-quests or nigh-quests?

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

mesahm•39m ago
nee-quests, I am French native.
duskdozer•20m ago
I guess kind of obvious now noticing the rhyme
u_sama•37m ago
There is a series of extensions for Vscode that add this functionality like https://github.com/ugi-dev/better-commits
duskdozer•26m ago
ah ok, I am familiar with and not exactly against (non-emoji) commit message prefixes
mesahm•37m ago
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
cies•1h ago
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

sdovan1•1h ago
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"
ayhanfuat•1h ago
More related drama: The Slow Collapse of MkDocs (https://fpgmaas.com/blog/collapse-of-mkdocs/)
znpy•51m ago
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.

rglullis•31m ago
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.
forkerenok•11m ago
What's the drama around starlette? (Can't find anything)
duskdozer•28m ago
>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.

nathell•49m ago
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!

mettamage•43m ago
> Visitor 4209 since we started counting

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

Kwpolska•36m ago
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)
maccard•29m ago
> 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

lenkite•23m ago
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....
localuser13•19m ago
>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.

glaucon•32m ago
Good line from the blog post ...

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

eats_indigo•13m ago
smells like supply chain attack
localuser13•11m ago
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.
CorrectHorseBat•5m ago
Don't you need to register and actively defend you trademark for it to apply?
Gander5739•4m ago
Is httpx trademarked? I couldn't find anything indicating it was.
ahoka•4m ago
I don't think HTTPX is a registered trademark.
zeeshana07x•10m ago
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