meta update for 2-3 conversion

[sjsrey]

swap out urllib2 for and use requests or httplib

[ljwolf]

Or try to futureproof requests stuff.

[pastephens]

I'm curious about the motivation for this.

pstephen@happyendings ~/D/pysal> grep -r urllib2 .
./distribute_setup.py: from urllib2 import urlopen
./pysal/init.py:import urllib2, json
./pysal/init.py: request = urllib2.urlopen(url)
Binary file ./pysal/init.pyc matches
./pysal/contrib/opendata/google.py:import urllib2
./pysal/contrib/opendata/google.py: rsp = urllib2.urlopen(url)
./pysal/meta/wmd.py:import urllib2 as urllib
./pysal/weights/weights_from_geojson.ipynb: "import urllib2 as urllib"
./tools/github_stats.py:from urllib2 import urlopen

[jlaura]

In PySAL-REST we have been using requests and that package has been significantly more pleasant to use than url lib. It looks like 99% of the url lib stuff is in either contrib or pseudo-experimental code. Is that the case? If so, and assuming we are pegging to anaconda/canopy then I would +1 the requests module.

[ljwolf]

There's also an idiom in six that may be easier than reimplementation in Requests, especially if requests doesn't support arbitrary chomp sizes.

[ljwolf]

I've tried a mutually-compatible version using six.moves.urllib over here.

I'll be running the doctests to check. If there are meta tests in the works, it'd be great to know.

[ljwolf]

2 of the 4 builtin reading tests are failing without any modification. I'm not going to worry about this for the 2to3 conversion until this codebase settles down.

[ljwolf]

I'd like to close this, but currently meta isn't even importable from PySAL:

>>> import pysal as ps
>>> from pysal import meta as m
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-22096d9ee5b5> in <module>()
----> 1 from pysal import meta as m

ImportError: cannot import name 'meta'
>>> ps.version
'1.11.2'