One solution would to be reimplement socket.inet_aton() with inet_pton() internally.

inet_pton() is well specified and standard (POSIX). inet_aton() is not ("inet_aton() is not specified in POSIX.1, but is available on most systems." says its Linux manual page).

>>> socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET, "1.2.3.4")
b'\x01\x02\x03\x04'
>>> socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET, "1.2.3.4 extra string")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: illegal IP address string passed to inet_pton

Problems:

* inet_pton() requires an address family. Should we iterate on all supported address families until one works?
* inet_pton() doesn't accept IPv4 "short format" like "127"

>>> socket.inet_aton("127")
b'\x00\x00\x00\x7f'
>>> socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET, "127")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: illegal IP address string passed to inet_pton