alt Hacker NewsThis sounds like an ideal use case for modshim [0]
One of its intended use cases is bridging contribution gaps: while contributing upstream is ideal, maintainers may be slow to merge contributions for various reasons. Forking in response creates a permanent schism and a significant maintenance burden for what might be a small change. Modshim would allow you to create a new Python package containing only the fixes for your bugbears, while automatically inheriting the rest from upstream httpx.
Since modshim isn't money patching and appears to only be wrapping the external API of a package, if the change is deep enough inside the package, wouldn't you end up reimplementing most of the package from the outside?