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Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 17:25:14 -0300
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To: nikita.ppv@gmail.com
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Don't silence fatal errors
From: casivaagustin@gmail.com (Agustin Casiva)

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On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 6:43 PM Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:

>  Hi internals,
>
> When the silencing operator @ is used, the intention is generally to
> silence expected warnings or notices. However, it currently also silences
> fatal errors. As fatal errors also abort request execution, the result will
> often be a hard to debug white screen of death.
>
> The most recent occurrence which motivated me to write this mail is
> https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=77205, but I've seen this play out
> multiple
> times already.
>
> I would like to propose to change the behavior of @ to only silence
> warnings, notices and other low-level diagnostics, but leave fatal errors
> intake. In particular, the following should not be silenced:
>
> * E_ERROR
> * E_CORE_ERROR
> * E_COMPILE_ERROR
> * E_USER_ERROR
> * E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR
> * E_PARSE
>
> This change would have two main implications for backwards compatibility:
>
> 1. Code that legitimately wants to silence fatal errors for whatever reason
> should now use error_reporting() (or ini_set()) to do so, instead of @.
>
> 2. Error handlers that want to only handle non-silenced errors may have to
> be adjusted. A common pattern I found in our own tests if checks for
> error_reporting() != 0 to detect silencing. This should be changed to
> error_reporting() & $err_no to detect whether the specific error type is
> silenced.
>
> A preliminary patch for this change is available at
> https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3685.
>
> What do you think about this?
>
> Nikita
>

I think the need of the @ is to silence everything, and I think is used
only in extreme cases where the developer can't handle properly the errors
(or the dev is kinda lazy to do it, I have used it a couple of times of
course :) ).

The developer that uses @ knows his risks and knows that can hides
important information for debugging, I don't think that showing fatal error
will help the developers in the long term, yes it might help it when is
debugging, but later when the code is in production and the @ is still in
place I think the developers will not expect to see any error.

I don't see the real value of this change knowing the price of lost of
backward compatibility.

My two cents.

Best

-- 
Casiva  Agustin

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Skype: casivaagustin
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