Python2.4's urllib2 broken by default on Solaris Express 5.11

While happily installing prerequisites to build an app on Solaris 11, i enjoyed having Mercurial already installed in the base syste”.. except for a BIG issue: digest authentication was broken. I tcpdump’ed the traffic exchanged between the mercurial client and the CGI server and I saw that no Authorization header was sent, and obivously the server refused to serve the hg repository.

Before reinstalling python, maybe from source and replacing the default installation or having side by side two different versions, with consequent nuisances and dirt around the system, I tried a very very small patch to urllib2.py that… amusingly enough, fixed my problem:

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