The documentation for urllib.urlopen() states:

"One caveat: the read() method, if the size argument is omitted or
negative, may not read until the end of the data stream; there is no
good way to determine that the entire stream from a socket has been read
in the general case."

To an innocent reader this effectively translates to:
"The read() method may silently truncate your data but we won't tell you
any details about it."

The paragraph should be clarified as follows:

- Under what circumstances can truncation happen (which protocols are
affected, under which conditions?)
- What are safe use-cases where truncation can not happen (e.g. the
common case of a simple HTTP-GET)

Would you be interested in working on a patch?

The section of the Dev Guide on "affirmative tone" should also be applied:

"The documentation focuses on affirmatively stating what the language does and how to use it effectively...."

http://docs.python.org/devguide/documenting.html#affirmative-tone

This caveat no longer appear in the doc, and I could not find anything similar, so I am concluding this is no longer relevant.