Thanks again.

Agree to use of returning the block size to the returnhook callable.
But this is going be a deviation from the existing behavior which was
present to inform the user at regular intervals and did not bother to
provide any 'progressive size' related data, so this change should
documented as new behavior.

With respect to the docs patch in urllib2 howto I would do something
like this.

with open(local_filename) as fh: 
     content = fh.read()

Or *better* would demonstrate the filename argument passing and
reporthook functionality. If you wish, take this part alone, (the
howto document) update as separate patch, which should be committed
once this is in.

There is one comment which I forgot to mention earlier.

The current urlretrieve function is internally calling the URLOpener's
retrieve method. 

Those URLOpener class might need a DeprecationWarning while address
thing bug and that particular retrieve method can be updated to use
the updated facility just as bonus till the time it survives.

Antoine - any suggestions on the last point?