Lack of read permission on main script leads to E_WARNING

I sent this message last week and haven't received a single reply. I
was hoping for someone to either agree that it was a bug and advise
if/when a patch would be included in PHP or explain why they believe
that this is the "correct" behavior for PHP.

Thanks in advance,

Ryan Dingman
rdingman@next-online.net
Next Online Mortgage Technologies

I believe that I've found a bug in the way that PHP handles
permission problems when accessing the main script.

If I access http://localhost/foo.php and PHP does not have
permission to read foo.php, I get an E_WARNING rather than an
E_COMPILE_ERROR (include vs. require). This is in PHP 5.1 RC4.
I've fixed this in a local build by patching zend_execute_scripts
in Zend/zend.c on line 1079. zend_execute_scripts was calling
zend_compile_file and passing ZEND_INCLUDE in as the type argument
rather than passing along its type argument. The old code reads:

EG(active_op_array) = zend_compile_file(file_handle, ZEND_INCLUDE
TSRMLS_CC);

My patched version reads:

EG(active_op_array) = zend_compile_file(file_handle, type TSRMLS_CC);

Because I'm not intimately familiar with the inner workings of the
interpreter, I'm not sure that this is the best way to fix this
problem, but it seems like the most appropriate place that I could
find.

In case you are wondering why I care -- we have a PHP module that
monitors PHP errors and redirects our customers to a customer
service page any time that PHP encounters anything that the
interpreter really shouldn't recover from (E_CORE_ERROR, E_ERROR,
E_PARSE, E_COMPILE_ERROR and E_USER_ERROR). The main script not
being readable is certainly a case where we would like to redirect
them to a customer service page. However, having an E_WARNING as
the error makes it difficult to identify this situation because we
would now have to distinguish between this E_WARNING and any others
that might arise in the site. Having an E_COMPILE_ERROR would be
much more definitive and more correct IMHO. Yes, we are taking
other steps to ensure that the permission on the PHP scripts for
our site are correct, but mistakes do happen and we want to
guarantee that our customers have as good an experience as possible
in the case of unexpected errors (as any enterprise site should).

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Ryan Dingman
rdingman@next-online.net
Next Online Mortgage Technologies