(I have never personally used context, so I'm not so sure what the expectations are with that.) Looking at the http docs, I don't see any reason to believe set

(I have never personally used context, so I'm not so sure what the expectations are with that.) Looking at the http docs, I don't see any reason to believe setting a context for a request would control timeouts. If the complaint is, "the http library API does not provide a way to set timeouts on a per-request basis," then OK, I guess, that's true, but I don't see why that should be a huge issue (just use different clients for the different timeout values you need). But if you really don't want to do that, it should be easy enough to access the underlying network connection and set the timeout before reading the body, though I've never done this. What Go is doing here still seems very reasonable from my perspective...