[Zope] Isolating changes that can only be done globally

[Michael Vartanyan]

Thank you Paul and others for all your invaluable input!

I considered using pycurl and it looks like this a bit of an overkill 
for my purpose (which is to simply tickle an external URL). At the same 
time I guess nobody would argue that that this is the most 
straightforward way. I agree with Chris though that it would not harm to 
add a possibility to adjust the timeout on the level of Request object 
in urllib2.

Thanks again for your kind and quick help.

Paul Winkler wrote:
> FWIW, the last time I did something like this I ended up using
> pycurl ( http://pycurl.sourceforge.net/ ).
> I don't have that code any more (it belongs to a former employer)
> but it was pretty easy to get working, it supported timeouts,
> it was fast, and it worked with a cantankerous proxy server setup that
> broke httplib.  (discussion here:
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-April/275678.html )
>
> -PW
>