The way I read the documentation, file.read() (and that's what we're
talking about) is still not guaranteed to read all the bytes of the
file.  But, you're right, that is the accepted semantics.  So the
documentation should change, too.

However, the "read" method on an SSLSocket, which is not a file()
subclass, is *not* guaranteed to return N bytes, it's guaranteed to
return at most N bytes.  Call "makefile" on SSLSocket if you need a
file-like object.