change in urlopen behavior

[Jamie Strandboge]

The fix for http://bugs.python.org/issue6631 that came in python2.7 2.7.2-13ubuntu5 may cause problems for people. Eg, in 2.7.2-13ubuntu4 this would work:
import urllib
url = "./foo.txt"
urllib.urlopen(url)

In 2.7.2-13ubuntu5 this code causes the following traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 86, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 207, in open
    return getattr(self, name)(url)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 462, in open_file
    return self.open_local_file(url)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 488, in open_local_file
    raise ValueError("local file url may start with / or file:. Unknown url of type: %s" % url)
ValueError: local file url may start with / or file:. Unknown url of type: ./foo.txt

While I have worked around it in the Ubuntu CVE tracker and this is not a blocker for my team, filing this bug as it may cause problems for others.

The workaround is simply to strip the './' off the front. Eg, a naive fix for the above might be:
import urllib
url = "./foo.txt"
if url.startswith('./'):
    url = url[2:]
urllib.urlopen(url)

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

closing this as fixed upstream for a long time