Thanks for the explanation. Your patch lgtm.

On Sat, Mar 26, 2016, at 15:01, Martin Panter wrote:
> 
> Martin Panter added the comment:
> 
> Socket objects aren’t exactly file-like. Plain non-SSL sockets don’t even
> have read() methods.
> 
> I think giving a meaning to recv(-1) would be an (unwanted) new feature,
> rather than a bug fix. If you want a file-like object linked to a socket,
> I would suggest using something like the makefile() method instead of
> adding to the low-level socket object API.
> 
> But to answer your question: no, most file methods treat a negative size
> as a special request to read until EOF, e.g. read(-1), readline(-1) and
> readlines(-1) of RawIOBase, BufferedIOBase and TextIOBase. On the other
> hand, BufferedIOBase.read1(-1) is poorly defined and supported (Issue
> 23214), but may end up meaning something like “read an arbitrary non-zero
> chunk with a minimum amount of low-level calls and processing”.
> 
> ----------
> 
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue26644>
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