I've attached a new patch disabling Nagle by default, but doing so in connect() as to allow users to override it if they really want to. I've also removed the use of mss in HTTPConnection. This is a backwards incompatible change in two ways:

1. Removing mss as a public attribute of the HTTPConnection. This /could/ be left as a property that pulls the TCP_MAXSEG option once a connection has been established, but I think it's better to just remove it altogether and have the users call into <HTTPConnection>.sock.getsockopt() instead.
2. If someone is expecting to be able to rely on Nagle by default, although I think this is rather unlikely for HTTP.

That said, I do agree that this is a simpler, more portable choice to solve the problem.