Shipping Breaking Changes as the Most Downloaded Python Package

The HTTP client library ‘urllib3’, the most downloaded Python package on the Python Package Index, is shipping breaking changes for the first time in over 9 years. The project is an invisible dependency to the vast majority of its users all while doing the heavy lifting for widely-deployed projects like pip, Requests, Selenium, Boto, and more. How can a project in this situation ship breaking changes without breaking the Python-verse? In this talk we’ll discuss what the breaking changes are, how we’re minimizing impact to users for each change, and what these changes mean for the future of urllib3.

About Seth Michael Larson

Seth is the lead maintainer of urllib3 since 2019 and has been a contributor to the project since 2016. He maintains a handful of other Python Open Source projects. Outside of Open Source Seth works as a Software Engineer at Elastic maintaining Python packages for many Elastic services as well as teaching and being an advocate, both internally and externally, for Python best practices. Seth is a Minnesota native and enjoys watching football, gardening, and being in nature.