Looking at this again, I think a less intrusive way forward would be to: * Document that in 3.6, the required signature is now BufferedIOBase.read1(size). An implementation no longer has to provide a default size, and no longer has to accept negative sizes. * Explicitly document the behaviour of each concrete implementation like GzipFile.read1(-1) etc, if this behaviour is intentional * Fix the BufferedReader error so that “read length must not be negative” Relaxing the read1() signature would allow wider or easier use of BufferedReader, e.g. to implement HTTPResponse as I suggested in Issue 26499. The advantage would be using existing code that is well tested, used, optimized, etc, rather than a custom BufferedIOBase implementation which for the HTTP case is buggy.