Re: Re: Test failure on MacOS X and Failure analysis

On 6/28/07, Zoe Slattery <zoe.slattery@googlemail.com> wrote:

Derick Rethans wrote: On Thu, 28 Jun 2007, Zoe Slattery wrote:

Hi I think there are two user scenarios to consider: (a) User works only on platform X and extpects the PHP function to return exactly what he would see from (say) the equivalent C function (b) User works on multiple platforms and wants his PHP app to behave exactly the same way across all of them. For writing tests it sounds like we are agreeing to follow scenario (a) but to makes changes to the doc so that the user in scenario (b) knows why his application might not work.

I'd say that PHP should work like in (b) though - everything should work the same on every platform. For many, or even most, functions that has to be the goal. But for filesystem functions I'm not sure that it's always practical, for eample chmod() has (as far as I know) no meaning on Windows but is very useful on Linux, so we'd have to differentiate here.

You are right, operating systems specific functions cannot be portable. However we have a couple of issues with some file system (or related functions) which should be solved soon or later. The one I can think about are realpath, basename, dirname or pathinfo (for example, pathinfo should/could be portable (someone reported a bug about it). recently). --Pierre