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[small timeout?]

Not since the changes to the makefile() changes to socket.py (or at least
not always).  If the timeout is shorter than the response time you now can
get a socket.error:

>>> socket.setdefaulttimeout(0.05)
>>> manatee = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy("http://manatee.mojam.com:5007")
>>> manatee.noop()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1021, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1308, in __request
    verbose=self.__verbose
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/xmlrpclib.py", line 1056, in request
    errcode, errmsg, headers = h.getreply()
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/httplib.py", line 1019, in getreply
    response = self._conn.getresponse()
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/httplib.py", line 770, in getresponse
    response.begin()
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/httplib.py", line 268, in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/httplib.py", line 230, in _read_status
    line = self.fp.readline()
  File "/Users/skip/local/lib/python2.3/socket.py", line 321, in readline
    data = recv(1)
socket.error: (35, 'Resource temporarily unavailable')

I think you may still get the assertion error if the timeout is sufficient to
allow some of the response to be read, but not all of it (though that's just
a guess).

I suspect we're better off just closing this with either "postponed" or
"won't fix" at this point.