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Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 07:36:11 -0700
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To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC][DISCUSSION] Deprecation of fallback to root scope
From: levim@php.net (Levi Morrison)

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 3:08 AM, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6 February 2018 at 01:51, Levi Morrison <levim@php.net> wrote:
>
>> It's fine to ignore them as long as they fix them later. That's
>> precisely why I think E_STRICT is a good category for these notices.
>> If, however, they ignore them forever that's their fault; we are
>> simply providing advanced notice of a behavior we'd like to eventually
>> change.
>>
>> Let me put "eventually" into perspective. We will probably have a 7.3
>> before we have an 8.0. This means that 8.0, the absolute earliest
>> version we could remove this feature, is at least 2 years away before
>> it reaches *any* of our users. Unless we extend it like we did with
>> the last 5.X release (and I think we probably should extend it) this
>> means that users can run their existing code on an officially
>> supported PHP 7 release for the next 4 years at the minimum. I am
>> fairly confident that for one reason or another it will delay another
>> year or two, putting it at 5-6 years.
>>
>
>
> I think for a lot of people the "forever" in your first paragraph and the
> "5-6 years" in your second paragraph will feel like the same thing. If the
> message is "this might be removed some time in the next decade", people
> will simply shrug and ignore it until an actual removal is announced;
> thinking as a cynical user, there's no guarantee the recommendation won't
> be changed back in future - we've had features "undeprecated" before.
>
> As others have pointed out, even if you run an analyser over your own code
> base to add \ in the appropriate places, you can't turn on E_STRICT notices
> without being flooded until all your dependencies have done the same - and
> there's no compelling reason for them to do so.
>
> That's why I think having some concrete benefit much sooner is the only way
> to stop people resenting this change. Build function autoloading in a way
> that it only works if you opt out of the fallback, and *then* deprecate the
> fallback mode, and it feels like progress rather than disruptive tinkering.

This thinking is too pessimistic. We cannot design to appease our
worst users. The advanced notice is better than a sudden one even if
we have function autoloading.