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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03.12.2016 02:37, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:

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

All I'm trying to do here is to introduce a more meaningful, stronger 
typing. See Yuri's comment on why that can be important.

I don't really know if the benefits really outweigh the inconvenience, 
but the only example you gave so far can be trivially solved from our side.

That leaves clients that perform "url encoding" manually using their own 
code, but there might be none of them, for all I know.

IME, JSON encoding is more popular than that, and those users are 
affected already.

> 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.

True.

> 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%.

Not true. All current users of json.el, at least, who have updated their 
code for Emacs 25, won't be affected. And I imagine they represent a 
significant fraction of `url-retrieve' users.