The following tar.bz2 contains a feature enhancement
proposal for the socket module to create wrappings of
the recvmsg and sendmsg primitives. These are sometimes
useful, especially when dealing with ancillary
messages, such as communicating the process, user and
group id of a remote process to a server for proper
identification.

These functions have so far been available in a
separate module (python-eunuchs from the twisted
project), but as they are standard POSIX and have been
available on *BSD, AIX, Linux and several other OSs for
some time they should be integrated into the core
socket module.

The attached file contains patches for configure.in the
socket module, socket.py and pyconfig.h.in. I've yet to
write a test-suite, and the documentation could use
some reworking.

That's really great, it's a shame this patch didn't get much interest. Do you feel like adding test to this, it would probably psuh for its inclusion ?

Bump.  This functionality seems to be needed if anyone is going to be 
messing around with advanced features of IPv6.   As it stands, the socket 
module in Python 2.6/3.0 is incomplete without this.

Just a followup comment to note that adding support for 
sendmsg()/recvmsg() is what you need to do "file descriptor passing" 
between processes on Unix---another technique for writing network servers.

The patch doesn't apply cleanly to the current trunk (which is
understandable, given the patch is from 2005). Also, some tests would be
welcome as Thomas said. And bonus points for documentation :)

Closing this as duplicate of #6560.