The wording in 138415 suggested this patch was changing socket to not support timeouts -- which would be unacceptable.  

But the actual patch only seems to touch multiprocessing/connection.py -- a far more reasonable change.

Unfortunately, the patch no longer applies to the development tip.  I *think* the places you wanted to change are still there, and just moved.

(1)  Is it sufficiently clear that this is not-a-feature to justify a backport?

(2)  Are the problems already fixed by some of the other changes?  (It doesn't look like it, but I'm not sure.)

(3)  Can you produce an updated patch?  (The current tip is http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/fec45282dc28/Lib/multiprocessing/connection.py  )

(4)  If I understand the intent, then s.setblocking(True) would be slightly more clear than s.settimeout(None), though that change obviously isn't essential.