Derek, 

This patch was along the lines that when IPv6 address is present, return
the first address,which I assumed to be active address and would make
the urllib2 work.

I am not sure, if returning all the addresses would help and how would
we define which address to use?

AI_CANONNAME flag, I don't accurately remember it now. But I had
encountered issues when testing on IPv-4 systems without it.

I am having different opinion on this issue now.

First is, taking from Facundo's comment on having this functionality in
gethostbyname() and implementing it in C. 

Second is, the wrapper function and suitable way needs to be defined.

I am sorry, I fail to understand the question on why ftp_open does
hostname resolution. You mean to say without it, if we pass it to
ftplib.FTP.connect() it would work for IPv6 address?