[ovs-dev] pwclient XML errors and form feeds

[Mark Michelson]

Earlier today on IRC I brought up an error I had while attempting to use
pwclient to get a patch from patchwork. Here [1] is the pastebin I linked
to. At the time, I thought it was due to HTTP chunked encoding being used
and the xmlrpclib or HTTP client library not handling that properly.

I debugged the problem further and I now have figured out that the problem
has to do with a form feed character being present in the patch. The
Patchwork server places the patch text inside an XML 1.0 document; however,
form-feeds are illegal in XML 1.0 [2]. This makes the use of form feeds and
the use of pwclient incompatible.

Aaron Conole pointed out that once Patchwork 2.0 is available, the git-pw
command will render pwclient obsolete. I checked, and git-pw will use
Patchwork 2.0's REST API (which is JSON-based) instead of XMLRPC, so this
is indeed only a temporary problem.

In the meantime, is there some other command line tool OVS devs use instead
of pwclient for getting patches?

Also also, can someone inform me why the coding guidelines encourage using
form feeds? Do they aid in documentation generation? Do people use editors
that render them in some meaningful way? Searching git logs and the mailing
list archives didn't give me anything to go on.

Thanks,
Mark Michelson

[1] https://paste.fedoraproject.org/paste/gE6neR6-Yf19YnO7hM576g
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets