The problem with httpx as a dependency is that it's currently working towards a 1.0 release which will be full of breaking changes.
The httpx2 project is essentially a fork that promises not to break the existing API, which makes it a more stable dependency to build against.
I wrote a pretty long comment about my concerns for the breaking 1.0 version last year - https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3344#discussionc... - in that comment I recommended the HTTPX project release their 1.0 as a package called httpx2 instead, but a year later we now have an httpx2 (released by a different maintainer) that keeps the old API.
The httpx maintainer closed off access to issues and discussions on the repo, has been ignoring PRs, and hasn’t updated it in a half a year.
I don’t think there is any reason to consider httpx as a viable project any more. The Pydantic httpx fork has taken its place.
Unfortunately that 1.0 work is happening in a private repository.
That’s even more reason to consider it non-viable.
There is no reason to encourage or support this type of behavior in a project. It is their right to do with it as they please, but I’m not interested in a project that functions like this. The forks are continuing to operate like true community projects.
Users of the project can (and have been) moving to forks that are operated as open, community projects in the continued spirit of the project’s original intention.
For what it’s worth, the maintainer has stated their reasons and they are not related to AI or scraper bots.
I have no idea what that means other this person might not be the easier to work with, or get along with.
He doesn't owe those developers anything, of course, but likewise they do not owe him loyalty and thus since an open fork exists, his project will die.
Killing the project is also his right, but people also have a right to be upset by his passive aggressive behavior. Just announce that you're shutting down the project and move on, don't waste our time.
I mean really, closing repos? excluding maintainers? committing only on private repos?
This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity to avoid exactly this situation of becoming a liability.
I've never seen a open source project page without a github link or a git clone ref like this https://www.encode.io/hx/ it is so ridiculous, wasn't that stuff on github? and isn't it anyway there due to over 1k forks?
what's the advantage of having this behavior? I see it only damaging towards the person, the project and the community.
They also effectively killed off MkDocs: https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/discussions/3677
Do they?
We started this fork because there was no activity on HTTPX, a very popular Python HTTP library.
A few weeks later, Pydantic started their own fork called HTTPX2. We decided to embrace this and support HTTPX2. We're upstreaming our fixes to HTTPX2 and in our opinion it should be the "blessed" fork. Pydantic can make this more successful than we ever can.
See also https://tildeweb.nl/~michiel/httpx2.html
Thanks for all your support!
Sander & Michiel
I mean, obviously Python 2.7 is newer than Python 3.1
I remember swearing I would never migrate to python3 but here we are, I migrated without even feeling it or realizing when (But I do remember django played a big role).
Happens with the Linux kernel as well.
Minors and hotfixes allow you to release a new version for an older release (like if you released 3.7 but you found a bug present in 3.4, you can release 3.4.1 which would be newer than 3.7), making it possible to have multiple supported versions at the same time.
You shouldn’t assume anything about relative date of 2.7 and 3.1.
I (ok, Qwen 3.7 27B) wrote some benchmarking code to compare throughput, and niquests seems to be substantially more performant for traffic that doesn't need to traverse the public web, e.g. intra cluster service to service communication:
https://gist.github.com/jtbaker/61061d27949ef48ac31e85ff28c2...
uv run scripts/bench_http.py --count 1000 Benchmarking 1000 requests to http://localhost:8000/health (concurrency=16, timeout=30.0s) Date: 2026-08-28T10:18:34.480111
Running httpx... Running httpx2... Running niquests...
Metric httpx httpx2 niquests ------------------------------------------------------- mean 17.8ms 4.6ms 3.3ms min 3.2ms 1.5ms 1.2ms max 632.4ms 11.1ms 10.8ms p50 15.9ms 4.2ms 3.0ms p95 32.4ms 7.4ms 5.6ms p99 52.1ms 8.5ms 8.4ms total 1.15s 315.5ms 239.7ms throughput 869.2 req/s 3170.0 req/s 4171.1 req/s
Winner: niquests (4.8x faster by wall clock)
yeah nice engineering clowns
But what are the upsides of this change?
I mean really, closing repos? excluding maintainers? committing only on private repos?
This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity to avoid exactly this situation of becoming a liability.
I've never seen a open source project page without a github link or a git clone ref like this https://www.encode.io/hx/ it is so ridiculous, wasn't that stuff on github? and isn't it anyway there due to over 1k forks?
what's the advantage of having this behaviour? I see it only damaging towards the person, the project and the community.
Unless OpenAI deprecates the HTTP endpoint, you can pretty much ignore the whole SDK packages.
When I first read the title, I assumed this was some fancy new protocol that extends HTTP or something. But it's just about an SDK switching one transitive dependency with a fork? And arguably one that should just have its functionality be part of stdlib?
But yes, it doesn't support HTTP3. Here's the related issue: https://github.com/pydantic/httpx2/issues/92
Not that there is anything wrong with QUIC, at least its built by someone who knows what they are doing, unlike HTTP2