Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:91061
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain basereality.com from 209.85.160.180 cause and error)
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <CANaX5nf4eDSVaYg=HygRO-vK7r9yAvdhzoTUOFHT1LHUjpQjgw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CANaX5nf4eDSVaYg=HygRO-vK7r9yAvdhzoTUOFHT1LHUjpQjgw@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2016 16:54:19 +0000
Message-ID: <CA+kxMuQCXB2VssedW9E=kvB4UfM+VbkWFHAZ4BFz9O7cWZA5Ag@mail.gmail.com>
To: Davey Shafik <davey@php.net>
Cc: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>, Sara Golemon <pollita@php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Add PHP_ENGINE Constant
From: danack@basereality.com (Dan Ackroyd)

On 3 February 2016 at 09:03, Davey Shafik <davey@php.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> It's actually very difficult to be able to reliably determine that you are
> running the _real_ PHP runtime and not something mimicking it.

The underlying problem seems to be caused by HHVM deliberately
'faking' the results of calls to zend_version() and the existing
constants. What is there to stop any other PHP implementations from
returning 'fake' data for that function or these new constants?

And just to play devils advocate, why isn't this a problem that should
be solved in those other versions of PHP? They're the ones re-using
version strings and so causing confusion.

I can see how this could be useful....I just can't see how this would
be a permanent solution to the problem. As someone else said, this
sounds like the old detecting browsers via "user agent headers" for
browser detection. That became a complete nightmare as browsers kept
imitating each other, and so the rules about strings became less and
less useful.

Perhaps it might be helpful to justify the RFC, if you can give some
more context as to why code needs to know about what VM it is running
on?

cheers
Dan