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Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:27:21 -0800
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To: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] _REQUEST and variable_order
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> This topic was already discussed here but never arrived to a conclusion, 
> so I will raise it again.
> The Problem:
> We have $_REQUEST superglobal, which is often used to abstract GET/POST 
> requests. However, in most cases we do not want GET/POST variables to 
> mean the same as cookie and environment variables. We can avoid that by 
> setting variables_order to 'GP' but then we lose _SERVER and _COOKIES 
> which still can be very much useful. We cannot also reliably use 
> something like 'CGP' since while it won't allow cookies to override 
> GET/POST we still have no way of not accepting cookie that has no 
> matching GET/POST. I think this should be cleaned up so that _REQUEST 
> behavior would conform its use case.
> 
> The proposal(s):
> 1. One way to fix it is to create a new .ini request_order that would 
> control just _REQUEST.
> 
> 2. Other solution would be to keep variables_order but drop 'C' parsing 
> from _REQUEST - i.e. make _REQUEST never include cookies. I don't know 
> how many people really need cookies together with get/post in REQUEST.
> 
> 3. Yet another solution would be to make superglobals independent of 
> variables_order - i.e. _COOKIE would always exist even if 
> variables_order doesn't have the letter. I actually don't see any reason 
> having JIT to remove any of the superglobals - if you don't use them, 
> with JIT you don't pay for them. And with COOKIES it's not that it would 
> be a big cost anyway - how many cookies could you have?
> Of course, it'd be more substantial change which could break some apps 
> relying on some quirks of current behavior.
> 
> So, what do you think on this?

They are all about equivalent.  Even #3 would need some sort of ini
override since otherwise it removes some flexibility we have today.
There are setups that specifically rely on disabling $_COOKIE to force
code to go through other mechanisms to get at the cookies.

Perhaps a combination of 1 and 2.  By default drop cookies from
$_REQUEST but have an ini override for the few cases where the app
actually relies on this behaviour.  I have seen multi-page forms where
instead of bouncing previous inputs along in hidden fields it gets
transmitted in cookies and they use $_REQUEST to keep track of all of
the responses.

-Rasmus