Open Stack

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new micro-library named
requestsexceptions.  Now the task of convincing the requests library
not to fill up your filesystem with warnings about SSL requests has
never been easier!

Over in infra-land, we use the requests library a lot, whether it's
gertty talking to Gerrit or shade talking to OpenStack, and we love
using it.  It's a pleasure.  Except for two little things.

Requests is in the middle of a number of unfortunate standoffs.  It is
attempting to push the bar on SSL security by letting us all know when
a request is substandard in some way -- whether that is because a
certificate is missing a subject alternate name field, or the version
of Python in use is missing the latest SSL features.

This is great, but in many cases a user of requests is unable to
address any of the underlying causes of these warnings.  For example,
try as we might, public cloud providers are still using non-SAN
certificates.  And upgrading python on a system (or even the
underlying ssl module) is often out of the question.

Requests has a solution to this -- a simple recipe to disable specific
warnings when users know they are not necessary.

This is when we run into another standoff.

Requests is helpfully packaged in many GNU/Linux distributions.
However, the standard version of requests bundles the urllib3 library.
Some packagers have *unbundled* the urllib3 library from requests and
cause it to use the packaged version of urllib3.  This would be a
simple matter for the packagers and requests authors to argue about
over beer at PyCon, except if you want to disable a specific warning
rather than all warnings you need to import the specific urllib3
exceptions that requests uses.  The import path for those exceptions
will be different depending on whether urllib3 is bundled or not.

This means that in order to find a specific exception in order to
handle a requests warning, code like this must be used:

  try:
      from requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions import InsecurePlatformWarning
  except ImportError:
      try:
          from urllib3.exceptions import InsecurePlatformWarning
      except ImportError:
          InsecurePlatformWarning = None

The requestsexceptions library handles that for you so that you can
simply type:

  from requestsexepctions import InsecurePlatformWarning
  
We have just released requestsexceptions to pypi at version 1.1.1, and
proposed it to global requirements.  You can find it here:

  https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requestsexceptions
  https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/requestsexceptions

-Jim