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Reply-To: jani.taskinen@iki.fi
To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
Cc: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>, 'PHP Internals' <internals@lists.php.net>
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Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:26:06 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] _REQUEST and variable_order
From: jani.taskinen@sci.fi (Jani Taskinen)

On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 20:27 -0800, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> 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.

What's wrong with the option 3? $_GET / $_POST / $_COOKIE should
_always_ be there regardless of any ini setting.  I didn't even know
(before Stas brought it up) that variables_order affects these so in my
book that's just a bug that needs fixing. And does not require any new
ini options.. :)

I pick door #3.

-- 
Patches/Donations: http://pecl.php.net/~jani/