Thank you for the feedback. I found the timeit discussion and briefly reviewed it.
I understand the concerns about adding CLI functionality to modules, but I believe the use case I’m proposing is very specific and minimal. The idea is not to replace curl or create a full-featured CLI for urllib, but simply to provide a way to perform an HTTP GET request and fail on HTTP errors, mimicking what curl -f does.
This could even be introduced as python -m urllib.healthchecker, keeping it focused on basic health checks for services. The goal here is to reduce both image size by around 4% and build time in hundreds of Python-based microservices, where every megabyte and second spent building the image counts.
Given the simplicity and the fact that it targets a common use case (health checks), I believe this could be a valid enhancement without introducing significant complexity or maintenance burden.