Consul net/rpc

Important: This fork was created exclusively for Consul. We will not accept any changes to this repository for any other use cases. We discourage any use of this library outside of Consul.

This repository contains a fork of the net/rpc package from the Go standard library. The codec that Consul uses contains references to the net/rpc package, so this fork also contains a fork of hashicorp/net-rpc-msgpackrpc and hashicorp/go-msgpack so those references to net/rpc point at the correct package.

Why does this fork exist?

net/rpc has been frozen since late 2016, which means no new changes will be made to the package, and none of the existing bugs will be fixed.

Consul uses net/rpc for almost all of its many RPC endpoints. Consul has started to use gRPC for some new RPC endpoints, but the work required to port all of the existing RPC endpoints to gRPC will take multiple years. Even after all endpoints are converted to gRPC, net/rpc endpoints will need to remain for at least one more major release to support upgrades of existing Consul deployments.

Consul users face operational challenges that require additional features that net/rpc does not provide. To address those problems we need a way of making changes to net/rpc.

This fork allows us to add some minor functionality to net/rpc while we work on porting all existing RPC endpoints to gRPC.

How is this fork different from the stdlib and go-msgpack?

We will limit the changes to this fork in the following ways:

• Any additions to net/rpc should be minimal hooks that allow functionality to be added from Consul. For example, an interceptor added to Server;
• Any deletes should be of functions that are not used by Consul;
• We will try to preserve the existing code structure as much as possible, for the unlikely case that we need to apply a patch from the stdlib;
• All changes should be additive, including existing test cases;
• hashicorp/net-rpc-msgpackrpc and hashicorp/go-msgpack should only receive updates from the upstream remote, with one exception. In some cases we may delete code that is not used by Consul, to allow the deletion of functions from this fork of net/rpc.