1. Maintainer’s controversial closure of the repo over gender‑representation concerns
The httpx maintainer shut down issues and discussions, saying they “don’t want to continue allowing an online environment with such an absurdly skewed gender representation. I find it intensely unwelcoming, and it’s not reflective of the type of working environments I value.” (ddorian43). Others echoed the sentiment, comparing it to “starting a primary school and then closing it because I hated that the overwhelming majority of employees were women.” (philipallstar). The move sparked debate about toxicity, entitlement, and the impact on the community.
2. Worry about breaking changes in httpx 1.0 and the rise of forks (e.g., httpx2) as stable alternatives
Commenters noted that “httpx as a dependency is … working towards a 1.0 release which will be full of breaking changes” (simonw) and that the maintainer “has been ignoring PRs, and hasn’t updated it in a half a year” making the project “non‑viable” (Aurornis). As a result, many see the Pydantic‑backed httpx2 fork—which “keeps the old API”—as a safer, community‑driven replacement.
3. Switch to the OS TLS trust store (instead of certifi) and its potential impact on internal/Corporate CAs
The change was flagged as “nb: operating system TLS trust store is used now (instead of certifi)” (tosh). Users warned that “this could be a breaking change (for some corporate network environments)” (zx8080) and criticized certifi for “confus[ing] all the junior devs when their venvs/containers etc can't access internal CA signed resources” (skullone). The shift simplifies CA management for some but raises concerns for those relying on private root CAs.