Julian Reschke added the comment:
An example URI for this issue is:
http://example.com/;
The RFC 3986 path component for this URI is /;.
After using urllib's parse function, how would you know?
(I realize that changing behavior of the existing API may cause problems
New submission from Julian Reschke:
urllib.parse tries to special-case params, which have been dropped from the
general URI syntax back in RFC 2396 (16 years ago).
In most cases this can be worked around by reconstructing the path from both
path and params; however this fails for paths
