I agree with facundobatista here.
1) I am not sure, if what you mention that doing POST in the 302
redirect url does not carry forward the POST data. Some examples would
help to verify that and if this is case, IMO its a bug in urllib2.
2) You mention solution 1 as RFC compliant? Does RFC mention about
changes to request headers for a redirection? Please quote the relevant
section
also I find in RFC2616 under 302 Found that:
<quote>      Note: RFC 1945 and RFC 2068 specify that the client is not
allowedto change the method on the redirected request. However, most   
   existing user agent implementations treat 302 as if it were a 303   
   response, performing a GET on the Location field-value regardless   
   of the original request method.</quote>
But could not find any references for behaviour with respect to POST on
redirection.