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rjray / rpc-xml

A Perl implementation of the XML-RPC specification
https://metacpan.org/release/RPC-XML
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Upgrade from 0.73 to 0.82 #16

Open bdonauba opened 10 months ago

bdonauba commented 10 months ago

Hello,

I'm maintaining an XML::RPC server application running on RPC::XML version 0.73.

I try to update to 0.82 but my function names are no longer accepted by RPC::XML.

The error message is: RPC::XML::request::new: Invalid method name specified

My function names have all a prefix containing a "-" sign and the dash causes the error.

$cli->send_request('de.bw-fe.aht.login',$mn,$user)

Please add the dash again to the allowed characters in function names.

rjray commented 10 months ago

Interesting-- I can't imagine I would have just removed that from the module without having a reason. I'll need to find the specific commit that made that change, and then see why it was made. I'll also double-check the XML-RPC specification, to see if maybe that was the source.

rjray commented 10 months ago

OK, I have found when the change was made (version 0.75), and I have found out WHY I added the test against the method name:

The \ must contain a \ sub-item, a string, containing the name of the method to be called. The string may only contain identifier characters, upper and lower-case A-Z, the numeric characters, 0-9, underscore, dot, colon and slash. It's entirely up to the server to decide how to interpret the characters in a methodName.

That's from the XML-RPC specification.

I'm not sure whether I should change this back or not, to be honest. Allowing something beyond the constraints of the specification could lead to issues in interoperation with XML-RPC implementations in other languages.

What are your thoughts on this? What would be the approximate effort of changing the names on your side, for all names that currently contain a - character?

bdonauba commented 10 months ago

Okay I see your point.

In the moment my task is to deploy this application (that was meant to be replaced) on a new host. I have only access to the server side. The clients side should stay "untouched".

I think the default behaviour should obey to the specification, although it would be nice to have some kind of legacy mode.

For now I just added the "-" in my local copy of the source code. As far as I can see there is only one place the function name gets checked. I can live with that too.