socket_timeout is currently used by comms.http.py to pass it to requests.session.request. Unfortunately older versions of requests accepts a single float (as well as an integer value I guess) whereas newer version uses a tuple of values. Therefor the config.socket_timeout is reconfigurated due to the given requests version.

This socket_timeout should be provide on higher level von pywikibot.comms to be reusable by other comms library parts such as eventstreams to prevent code duplication.