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Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2024 07:37:02 +0300
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Revisiting case-sensitivity in PHP
Cc: php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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From: raveren@gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Rokas_=C5=A0leinius?=)

I'm no one important, but I just want to say for the sake of the
public image of PHP I hope this does not pass, or at least not in the
foreseeable future.

There are NO substantial gains to speak of here and the BC break is
real and it's super annoying when they pile up and up.

Besides, this is slightly off topic, but I don't know if you know, but
if you take a look at stackoverflow developer survey over the years,
there has been an absolute 30% drop of php popularity in the past few
years.

I would guess this is mostly the low-level developers not being fans
of the language removing magic quotes and other "super useful"
features. In other words, PHP lost the average joe as its target
audience. Joe's gone.

Just my 2=C2=A2:
a) this WAS the reason PHP was great and I loved to rewrite the
systems of several very successful companies who started out with
their non-technical founders who coded their way out of the box to
begin multi-million businesses
b) the PHP core and co. (a.k.a. YOU) should be acutely aware that the
language needs to be liked by not only you, dear awesome lovely
hardcore nerds, but also the users who just need to get stuff done,
business needs fulfilled.

I know this is not how YOU work, but if you ignore that part of the
language users, there might eventually not be a language to work on in
the future.

So please, keep the language loose, I hate the slight inconsistency
too, but if we ruin the day for another 20% of users, it might even be
the straw that broke the camel's back.

On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 at 02:38, Valentin Udaltsov
<udaltsov.valentin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Friday, 14 June, 2024=E2=80=AF=D0=B3. at 00:04, Timo Tijhof <ttijhof@w=
ikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> Would this affect unserialize()?
>>
>> I ask because MediaWiki's main "text" database table is an immutable/app=
end-only store where we store the text of each page revision since ~2004. I=
t is stored as serialised blobs of a value class. There have been a number =
of different implementations over the past twenty years of Wikipedia's exis=
tence (plain text, gzip-compressed, diff-compressed, etc.).
>>
>> When we adopted modern autoloading in MediaWiki, we quickly found that b=
lobs originally serialized by PHP 4 actually encoded the class in lowercase=
, regardless of the casing in source code.
>>
>> From https://3v4l.org/jl0et:
>>>
>>> class ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob {=E2=80=A6}
>>> print serialize($blob);
>>> # PHP 4.x: O:27:"concatenatedgziphistoryblob":=E2=80=A6
>>> # PHP 5/7/8: O:27:"ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob":=E2=80=A6
>>
>>
>> It is of course the application's responsibility to load these classes, =
but, it is arguably PHP's responsiblity to be able to construct what it ser=
ialized. I suppose anything is possible when announced as a breaking change=
 for PHP 9.0. I wanted to share this as something to take into consideratio=
n as part of the impact. Potentially worthy of additional communicating, or=
 perhaps worth supporting separately.
>>
>> --
>> Timo Tijhof,
>> Principal Engineer,
>> Wikimedia Foundation.
>> https://timotijhof.net/
>>
>
> Hi, Timo!
>
> Thank you very much for bringing up this important case.
>
> Here's how I see this. If PHP gets class case-sensitivity, unserializatio=
n of classes with lowercase names will fail. This is because the engine wil=
l start putting `MyClass` class entry with key `MyClass` (not `myclass`) in=
to the loaded classes table and serialization will not be able to find it a=
s `myclass`.
> Even if some deprecation layer is introduced (that puts both `myclass` an=
d `MyClass` keys into the table), you will first have a ton of notices and =
then eventually end up with the same problem, when transition to case sensi=
tivity is complete. Hence I propose no deprecation layer =E2=80=94 it does =
not really help.
>
> However, you will be able to use `class_alias()` to solve your issue. If =
classes are case-sensitive, `class_alias(MyClass::class, 'myclass');` shoul=
d work, since MyClass !=3D myclass anymore. And serialization works perfect=
ly with class aliases, see https://3v4l.org/1n1as .
>
> --
> Valentin Udaltsov
>