Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:55577
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.220.170 as permitted sender)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: kalle.php@gmail.com
In-Reply-To: <1316629502-sup-831@fewbar.com>
References: <4E790B82.6090805@akbkhome.com>
	<8C.A0.17510.E4DE97E4@pb1.pair.com>
	<1316615094.2810.5.camel@guybrush>
	<CAEZPtU51Hk+kmLhNqnCjDbRuW2t7QUumQX2qotPKLbeJkD1rAA@mail.gmail.com>
	<1316629502-sup-831@fewbar.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:41:14 +0200
Message-ID: <CAJW__o0WKqh0f71+r4m7ZMf2XhyJT3brs=9Phz=jFHtn=OQkaA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Clint Byrum <clint@ubuntu.com>
Cc: internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: is_a() - again - a better fix
From: kalle@php.net (Kalle Sommer Nielsen)

Hi

2011/9/21 Clint Byrum <clint@ubuntu.com>:
> Just to give some perspective on this, we specifically did not ship php
> 5.3.8 in Ubuntu 11.10 (in beta right now) because of this confusion.
> This is in spite of the fact that it would have closed many bugs, and
> reduced some of the burden on our security team since they are charged
> with back-porting all security fixes to whatever we ship. I was kind of
> hoping it would be rolled back rapidly in another release.
>
> From a distribution standpoint, the change in 5.3.8 is a nightmare
> and will require us to either ship with lots of bugs in the dependent
> packages, or lots of patches and delta from upstream. Reverting back to
> the pre 5.3.8 behavior would allow us to ship the new version and move
> forward with future versions without worry.
>
> One question.. if things have been adapted for 5.3.8 .. will they be
> negatively affected by a rollback to pre 5.3.8 behavior? If not, I'd
> wonder why there would be any resistance at all to doing this, as it
> seems more important that 5.3 is consistent from early versions to the
> latest than it is that one version had a serious problem.

While I respect from a package maintainer standpoint the thought of
reverting to the pre 5.3.8 behaviour would help the Ubuntu project,
however, in the whole image it does not help the PHP project and it
will without doubt create even more confusion than whats already been
done by the change to is_a().

I've always been against changing behavior from de-facto PHP because
people will quickly adapt to their distro behavior and wonder why
their code breaks when they run it on their server thats using a
de-facto version of PHP and the blame normally ends up at us.



-- 
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net