http://bugs.python.org/issue16270 identified an issue with ftpwrapper.endtransfer that causes ftp fetches to hang in certain situations. A fix was applied to python 3. I see the same issue on python 2.7, and the patch from 16270 fixes it. Is there a reason this fix hasn't been backported to 2.7?

To reproduce:

import urllib
url = "ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database/ratings.list.gz"
fp = urllib.urlopen(url)
fp.close()  # hangs