Change socket.error to inherit from IOError rather than being a stand alone class. This addresses the primary concern in http://bugs.python.org/issue1706815 python-dev discussion here: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-July/073749.html I chose IOError rather than EnvironmentError as the base class since socket objects are often used as transparent duck typed file objects in code already prepared to deal with IOError exceptions. also a minor fix: urllib2 - fix a couple places where IOError was raised rather than URLError. for better or worse, URLError already inherits from IOError so this won't break any existing code. test_urllib2net - replace bad ftp urls.

--- a/Modules/socketmodule.c	Sun Sep 09 20:25:00 2007 +0000
+++ b/Modules/socketmodule.c	Sun Sep 09 23:36:46 2007 +0000
@@ -4280,7 +4280,8 @@
 	if (m == NULL)
 		return;
 
-	socket_error = PyErr_NewException("socket.error", NULL, NULL);
+	socket_error = PyErr_NewException("socket.error",
+					  PyExc_IOError, NULL);
 	if (socket_error == NULL)
 		return;
         PySocketModuleAPI.error = socket_error;