use of remote procedure call in NETCONF protocol

[Mark]

I was reading RFC6241 about netconf, where it's said about RPC as a
messaging mechanism of the protocol. However, the spec defines XML for
transmitting RPC messages, so I don't quite understand why this is still
called RPC? I used to think of RPC as described in wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_Computing_Remote_Procedure_Call,
i.e. there should be a stub function defined (as done by rpcgen on Unix) and
so on, but what NETCONF says does not strictly follow this paradigm, rather
it defines a mechanism to transmit parameters over wire, and doesn't define
anything about stub or client-server behaviour.

Perhaps, I misunderstand RPC as a concept. Could anybody clarify RPC in
netconf for me? Thanks

[Barry Margolin]

Post by Mark
I was reading RFC6241 about netconf, where it's said about RPC as a
messaging mechanism of the protocol. However, the spec defines XML for
transmitting RPC messages, so I don't quite understand why this is still
called RPC? I used to think of RPC as described in wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_Computing_Remote_Procedure_Call,
i.e. there should be a stub function defined (as done by rpcgen on Unix) and
so on, but what NETCONF says does not strictly follow this paradigm, rather
it defines a mechanism to transmit parameters over wire, and doesn't define
anything about stub or client-server behaviour.
Perhaps, I misunderstand RPC as a concept. Could anybody clarify RPC in
netconf for me? Thanks

RPC has several meanings. It can refer to the general concept of using
the network to invoke a procedure on a server, which can be implemented
with a variety of network protocols and parameter representations (for
instance, web APIs can be considered to be a kind of RPC). This is how
the above RFC is using the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_procedure_call

It can also refer specifically to the Open Network Computing RPC
protocol, which uses XDR for its parameter representation, that Sun
implemented.