The problem with httpx as a dependency is that it's currently working towards a 1.0 release which will be full of breaking changes.
The httpx2 project is essentially a fork that promises not to break the existing API, which makes it a more stable dependency to build against.
I wrote a pretty long comment about my concerns for the breaking 1.0 version last year - https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3344#discussionc... - in that comment I recommended the HTTPX project release their 1.0 as a package called httpx2 instead, but a year later we now have an httpx2 (released by a different maintainer) that keeps the old API.
HTTPX stable hasn't had a release since December 2024, but there have been two dev releases of the 1.0 branch this month (after a gap since September 2025.)
Unfortunately that 1.0 work is happening in a private repository.
> Unfortunately that 1.0 work is happening in a private repository.
That’s even more reason to consider it non-viable.
There is no reason to encourage or support this type of behavior in a project. It is their right to do with it as they please, but I’m not interested in a project that functions like this. The forks are continuing to operate like true community projects.
For the users of the project, the reasons don’t matter. They’re free to do as they want for any reason they choose.
Users of the project can (and have been) moving to forks that are operated as open, community projects in the continued spirit of the project’s original intention.
For what it’s worth, the maintainer has stated their reasons and they are not related to AI or scraper bots.
> I don't want to continue allowing an online environment with such an absurdly skewed gender representation. I find it intensely unwelcoming, and it's not reflective of the type of working environments I value.
I have no idea what that means other this person might not be the easier to work with, or get along with.
That is a legitimate feeling, but to spite the trillion dollars company he also hurts thousands of regular developers.
He doesn't owe those developers anything, of course, but likewise they do not owe him loyalty and thus since an open fork exists, his project will die.
Killing the project is also his right, but people also have a right to be upset by his passive aggressive behavior. Just announce that you're shutting down the project and move on, don't waste our time.
unbelievable, how can a single person affect negatively FOSS so much?
I mean really, closing repos? excluding maintainers? committing only on private repos?
This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity to avoid exactly this situation of becoming a liability.
I've never seen a open source project page without a github link or a git clone ref like this https://www.encode.io/hx/ it is so ridiculous, wasn't that stuff on github? and isn't it anyway there due to over 1k forks?
what's the advantage of having this behavior? I see it only damaging towards the person, the project and the community.
This level of entitlement is the reason that FOSS has a maintenance / support epidemic. Maintainers don't owe you anything. They put the work in, not you.
they owe us the responsibility of having created, released and maintained something that they created and they are responsible for.
If you cannot handle or take this responsibility towards the community you cannot do opensource. just do a company and try to profit, but don't interfere with FOSS and impact FOSS in general if you cannot handle it.
>THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
> how can a single person affect negatively FOSS so much?
FOSS is not affected negatively.
First because FOSS is not en entity in the first place. There is no "community" per se but a muriad of softwares choosing open source licences for various reasons.
Second because the choices of one project maintainer is negligible.
> This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity
Banned by who and where?
> I've never seen a open source project page without a github link or a git clone ref
Now I understand. You must be new. How old are you? 10? FOSS has existed way before github and will probably still exist when github will be forgotten. There are still many open source projects not using github, some do not even use git.
> what's the advantage of having this behavior?
Not having to deal with external input, PRs, bug reports seems to be a good example.
> I see it only damaging towards the person
Which person? The maintainer? I highly doubt so.
> the project
The project will be fine as long as the maintainer wants it to be active. This is the only thing that counts.
> and the community.
Which community? Other devs? They can (and do) fork when they wish to do so.
>FOSS is not affected negatively.
First because FOSS is not en entity in the first place. There is no "community" per se but a muriad of softwares choosing open source licences for various reasons.
Second because the choices of one project maintainer is negligible.
Yes it is, this was a major component.
>This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity
By moderators that are not existing but should actually moderate human mental issues affecting FOSS
>Now I understand. You must be new. How old are you? 10? FOSS has existed way before github and will probably still exist when github will be forgotten. There are still many open source projects not using github, some do not even use git.
Nope, is just that a useful open source project for me has always public report and that's the basis to start collaborating.
>Not having to deal with external input, PRs, bug reports seems to be a good example.
That's normal in open source, should be taken into account and managed like everybody else does in open source projects. Just go look at sftpgo, as an example.
>Which person? The maintainer? I highly doubt so.
Yes clearly, the community easily realizes this behavior and now I see a private path of commits in private reps of somebody working alone.
>The project will be fine as long as the maintainer wants it to be active. This is the only thing that counts.
Nope, forked, hated and closed are not fine for an open source project.
>Which community? Other devs? They can (and do) fork when they wish to do so.
All of it, anybody using the open source, should be free to use, modify and collaborate on a project independently from the mental issues of the one that started it. closing repos just goes against all of this and should be a shame.
> Nope, is just that a useful open source project for me has always public report and that's the basis to start collaborating.
> All of it, anybody using the open source, should be free to use, modify and collaborate on a project independently from the mental issues of the one that started it. closing repos just goes against all of this and should be a shame.
You are making a false assumption that open source software is about the author surrendering is rights and forced collaboration. It is not.
Open source software is about the use of a license that grants the end user rights to study, modify and publish modifications (basically giving rights to fork) under the same or compatible license, often with mandory author attribution. There is nothing in these licenses about original author duties on maintaining a project open to collaboration, it is only about user rights.
yes I believe we are, and such indefinite maintenance is the result of FOSS and open repos and open collaboration that can re-iterate and keep a strong and decent level of maintenance.
maintainers are very important to me because i know the effort behind and the backbone of passion that holds them alive, and I would do the same, I would do it for passion and ask nothing back, especially topics like Credits and Copyrights (go check the related history, a shame)
That's easily the strangest self-destruction I've ever seen. "Skewed gender representation"? Not sure how that matters or what the intended effect of salting the earth here was.
It’s a complex topic that’s usually treated with a lot of bias and very little nuance. Most mental health issues tend to be treated as something to be removed whereas in the case of gender dysphoria, the empirically proven treatment is (of course treated case-by-case) to transition. Similarly, dysphoria (when being trans, most commonly) is often treated as some form of perversion or threat. It’s complicated.
people think other people are 'toxic' for the silliest of things most times; and this person is saying some maintainer is toxic to put it out there but provides no information as to why.. so i figured my context is as good as theirs
We started this fork because there was no activity on HTTPX, a very popular Python HTTP library.
A few weeks later, Pydantic started their own fork called HTTPX2. We decided to embrace this and support HTTPX2. We're upstreaming our fixes to HTTPX2 and in our opinion it should be the "blessed" fork. Pydantic can make this more successful than we ever can.
"I recommended the HTTPX project release their 1.0 as a package called httpx2 instead, but a year later we now have an httpx2 (released by a different maintainer) that keeps the old API"
I mean, obviously Python 2.7 is newer than Python 3.1
I remember swearing I would never migrate to python3 but here we are, I migrated without even feeling it or realizing when (But I do remember django played a big role).
There are a lot of large projects where X.1 is newer than Y.0. You release a new major version for breaking changes, but you backport security changes to previous major releases as well.
Minors and hotfixes allow you to release a new version for an older release (like if you released 3.7 but you found a bug present in 3.4, you can release 3.4.1 which would be newer than 3.7), making it possible to have multiple supported versions at the same time.
Same! Recently ported some code from httpx -> niquests and the experience has been good, although admittedly the governance of the project seems a little unclear.
I (ok, Qwen 3.7 27B) wrote some benchmarking code to compare throughput, and niquests seems to be substantially more performant for traffic that doesn't need to traverse the public web, e.g. intra cluster service to service communication:
I opened an issue some time ago about them monkey patching urllib3, it was fixed than but I now see the issue has been outright deleted.
Oh and now I see there is a URLLIB3_NO_OVERRIDE thing... I would not recommend this project.
> I've closed off access to issues and discussions.
> I don't want to continue allowing an online environment with such an absurdly skewed gender representation. I find it intensely unwelcoming, and it's not reflective of the type of working environments I value.
unbelievable, how can a single person affect negatively FOSS so much?
I mean really, closing repos? excluding maintainers? committing only on private repos?
This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity to avoid exactly this situation of becoming a liability.
I've never seen a open source project page without a github link or a git clone ref like this https://www.encode.io/hx/ it is so ridiculous, wasn't that stuff on github? and isn't it anyway there due to over 1k forks?
what's the advantage of having this behaviour? I see it only damaging towards the person, the project and the community.
A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.
Ugh. certifi the most annoying thing ever. It snuck into numerous python dependencies, never made anything better, and confuses all the junior devs when their venvs/containers etc can't access internal CA signed resources. Probably have explained what to do over 9,000 times. And for what? "To provide updated root CAs". Meh. I don't need daily CA trust store updates. If your CA roots are that new, I want nothing to do with it. Cert issuers (cough sectigo and their amateur hour CA root rotation recently, not even Mozilla had it).
we have recently switched from httpx for the same reason but instead went with the Rust-based pyqwest (runs on Hyper) it has also a drop-in httpx-compatible transport so migration was easy and also it supports http2 trailers
that's not really much of an argument, almost all reasonable libraries wrap the functionality.and if a provider doesn't want to support http3 then the library will fallback, and then the laggards should pay the slow tax.
Requests has been dead for over a decade. It doesn’t support HTTP/2, it doesn’t support HTTP/3, it doesn’t support async, and they ignore security vulnerabilities for months.
Nobody should use requests. If you are still using it, the quickest way to get off it is to switch to niquests, which is actively developed, supports all the things I mentioned above, and API-compatible with requests - you can just do `import niquests as requests` for an instant upgrade.
Async. And it comes with WSGI and ASGI transport adapters [1], which are amazing for testing/debugging with the client and server in a single process. And I personally find the httpx API is much cleaner and more composable, but ymmv.
I'd second this question. And I really mean that in a sincere way. Why is the choice of a random HTTP library in an SDK such an engaging topic of discussion here? Is there some context I'm missing?
When I first read the title, I assumed this was some fancy new protocol that extends HTTP or something. But it's just about an SDK switching one transitive dependency with a fork? And arguably one that should just have its functionality be part of stdlib?
The requests packages fundamental API is good enough and is now maintained by the PSF. I don't understand why OpenAI and Anthropic don't just throw some $$$ to the PSF for focused improvements and expansion of it.
The maintainers of requests have made it pretty clear that they consider that package feature complete, and have not showed interest in adding native async support to the core.
The problem with httpx as a dependency is that it's currently working towards a 1.0 release which will be full of breaking changes.
The httpx2 project is essentially a fork that promises not to break the existing API, which makes it a more stable dependency to build against.
I wrote a pretty long comment about my concerns for the breaking 1.0 version last year - https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3344#discussionc... - in that comment I recommended the HTTPX project release their 1.0 as a package called httpx2 instead, but a year later we now have an httpx2 (released by a different maintainer) that keeps the old API.
reply