Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:78857
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain lsces.co.uk from 217.147.176.214 cause and error)
Message-ID: <545FD319.3040703@lsces.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 20:48:25 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.2.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "internals@lists.php.net >> PHP internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <CABRjmp-oqEVtX-igQWsr-JkFmitqxn4YsyJ=mnzyHCN9Kj7akA@mail.gmail.com> <CAH-PCH62GAecxC00aHgzgskG8zk58z1LBE1uBv81xtj6hRiy5w@mail.gmail.com> <3E2593DC-5755-48A6-8802-6F2FB3625778@ajf.me> <CAEZPtU5bdrgX3yfNZhPsWqrU6d5fw=vX78-iW=gx1jUJoeF8YA@mail.gmail.com> <04723EAD-4C8E-41C2-BE81-4989882A0C69@ajf.me> <545B26BB.9020406@lsces.co.uk> <545B589A.4010606@gmx.de> <545B66AB.2000109@lsces.co.uk> <545C2785.4010004@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <545C2785.4010004@gmx.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Thresholds of backwards compatibility breaks
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

On 07/11/14 01:59, Christoph Becker wrote:
> Nobody suggested to switch off error reporting.  IMO, E_STRICT is
> supposed to be a weak form of E_DEPRECATED, i.e. a hint for the
> developer to modernize the code in the near future.  Until this can be
> done, it seems to be perfectly fine to suppress *these* warnings.  When
> the developer finds the time to fix the outstanding issues, running the
> test suite in a development environment should catch most (if not all)
> of them.  If there is no test suite, the developer is likely to be out
> of luck anyway, IMHO.
> 
>> > Screwing up the code and then hiding the results is NOT maintaining BC!
> Apparently, the inclusion of E_STRICT to E_ALL wasn't supposed to screw
> up anything.

Incremental changes from one version to the next may work for some
people. The problem is bringing Pre-5.2 code forward so that it can
reliably co-exist with already 'fixed' code. Many of the ISP's who tried
simply switching their shared hosting to 5.4 found that so many sites
simply stopped working that they had to revert the change. It is not
'developers' who have to find the time to make legacy code work on
current servers ... it's users who have no idea even where to start!
That their site is simply producing a white screen is not a help so
perhaps the 'defaults' would be better off in favour of the
unsophisticated user rather than something that pleases developers? Not
that it helps anyway since distributions all throw their own two pennies
in, and the 'suggested fixes' fail because the files are not where we
tell them. That is if the hosting company even allow access.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk