Re: bug#23750: 25.0.95; bug in url-retrieve or json.el

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> If we make the proposed change, this function will violate the
> contract on url-request-data (if the described above is its main use
> case).
>
> Luckily, this function is part of Emacs, so we can fix it in the same patch.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to respond to this without making
accusations of a bad faith response on your part.

This is a function will an ill-defined interface, but virtually all
callers here understand what the interface is ("don't put anything into
the body that isn't ASCII").  Even if wonkily defined, this works for
virtually all callers, in-tree or not.

You're proposing a change that would make virtually all these usages of
this (ill-defined) function fail.

The real fix for this extremely obscure problem is 1) to remove the
`error' call you introduced in Emacs 25.1, and 2) make the
Content-Length header reflect the number of octets transferred instead
of the number of bytes in the URL string.  This would have moved the
number of successful calls to `url-retrieve' from (I'm guesstimating)
99.9995% to 99.999995%, and people who wanted to send iso8859-1 text to
web servers would still fail.  But these people are pretty rare.

Your proposal would move the number of successful calls to
`url-retrieve' with a body to around 0%.

At this point I'm not sure what else to say.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no