device operations are recursive if serialized

[Akasurde]

SUMMARY

Fixes:

• Serialization issue with vmware_guest  #35721
• vmware_guest : RuntimeError (maximum recursion depth exceeded) #33760

(cherry picked from commit 0bb3c43)

ISSUE TYPE

• Bugfix Pull Request

COMPONENT NAME

lib/ansible/module_utils/vmware.py

ANSIBLE VERSION

Stable-2.4

[ansibot]

cc @Akasurde @dav1x @jctanner @nerzhul
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[Akasurde]

Closing and re-opening for CI trigger.

[ansibot]

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[Akasurde]

@mattclay Can you please help me understand this CI error ?

[mattclay]

@Akasurde I'm investigating.

[mattclay]

@Akasurde The failure is due to the release of coverage 4.5. I'm working on a fix.

[merloon]

shipit

[mattclay]

The CI issue should be fixed now. I've restarted CI for this PR.

[Akasurde]

@mattclay Thanks a lot for looking into this.

@abadger Could you please add this to 2.4 backport list ?

[abadger]

Should this throw an error if it is unable to encode? ```to_text(Foo, errors='surrogate_or_strict')``` If not, feel free to merge to stable-2.4. we're currently not in a freeze for that branch.

[Akasurde]

@abadger I don't think this is necessary as VMware returns localised version of message. I will merge this PR then. Thanks for information.

@mattclay @merloon @abadger Thanks for review.

[abadger]

Did you mean to say it *does not* return localized messages? If it returns localized messages, then it can return not-utf8 which is where we have to decide whether to throw an error or munge the output.