Popups in the cgi win binaries View as Markdown

Hi,

while investigating on https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=68297 it turned
out, the MessageBox'es we have on several places lead to issues. This
particular ticket describes firstly an insufficient error message, but
secondly - it goes into a popup which is then automatically logged to the
event log. Thereby every warning becomes a separate record with the same
id. Under circumstances that leads just to over flooded event logs. On
earlier server versions it led also to worse issues like described here
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61433 - a cgi process would hang until it
was killed bu the process manager.

So for one, to fix the #68297 I'd suggest to remove the msg box and output
to stderr or explicitly to the event log. But then generally, I would
suggest to remove the gui elements whereever they're used in PHP starting
with the next possible 5.5 release. While it might look short cut and too
late for 5.5, there's indeed no scenario imaginable where such graphical
elements could be used even as a feature. Neither on console nor as a
server module or CGI.

To see what happens with the current situation, a snippet like this can be
used

php-cgi.exe -n -d a=b -d foo=1()

Then one will see a popup with an error message and a record in the error
log under "windows logs" => "system". Logging to stderr with a better
error message it would under circumstances land in the event log as well,
or one can do a redundant syslog call.

If anyone has a worky scenario illustrating these popups being useful,
please respond so we can workout a better solution. Otherwise I'd probably
be starting with replacing them some when next week.

Regards

Anatol