Valid port numbers not representable

[Fryie]

The ClientRequest.Options enum assumes that port numbers will be represented by a signed 16-bit integer. However, valid port numbers are actually unsigned 16-bit integers.

This means that port numbers 32768-65535 (which are supposed to be valid) cannot be represented. In particular, it means that all dynamic ports won't work.

[ianpartridge]

Thank you for reporting this limitation. We are aware of this problem - unfortunately as changing the type of a public enum's associated value case is a SemVer Major change we are stuck with this until we decide to do Kitura-net 3.0.0.

We don't have any current plans to do so as the server-side ecosystem including Kitura is migrating to https://github.com/apple/swift-nio and hence Kitura-net is gradually becoming obsolete.

So unless anyone can think of a way we can fix this without breaking SemVer Major, this is probably WONTFIX :(

[Fryie]

Thanks for the response. Maybe an ugly fix/workaround could be to introduce a new enum ClientRequest.NewOptions (or whatever) and add an overloaded function like HTTP.request(_ options: NewOptions)? I don't know how feasible / acceptable that would be.

[ianpartridge]

🤢 😀

[djones6]

@ianpartridge I recently ran into this, and was considering the workaround proposed above. I agree it would be ugly to introduce a 'new' API, however we wouldn't have to live with it indefinitely, and could fix it properly in the next Kitura-net / Kitura-NIO major.

This issue also affects Kitura-CouchDB since it is built on top of ClientRequest.

[djones6]

@pushkarnk proposed a neat workaround for this in Kitura/Kitura-NIO#140 which I've replicated in #285. @Fryie would this be sufficient for now?

[djones6]

Kitura-net 2.1.4 and Kitura-NIO 1.0.9 have been tagged with #285 which provides this workaround:

In order to pass a port number greater than 32,767 (Int16.max), use the following code:

let portNumber: UInt16 = 65535
let portOption: ClientRequest.Options = .port(Int16(bitPattern: portNumber))