Rasmus Lerdorf (rasmus@php.net) wrote:
Think about whether in each of these cases it would have happened if the
developers of the app had developed with E_NOTICE on. In a high number of
these cases it probably wouldn't. And if this number is close to 100%,
then it would point to the fact that there is another less destructive
solution here.
This is why I want to go through and investigate existing PHP code and
have a look.
I'm a user of PHP, who would describe himself as approaching "expert"
in my knowledge.
I took a suggestion from earlier in this thread, and turned off
E_NOTICE. An excellent idea. I found a few holes in some of my code,
which I was glad to repair, and grateful to the language for pointing
out to me.
The suggestion to turn off register_globals by default is an extremely
bad one. It would make using PHP nothing short of a pain in the ass,
break vast amounts of code, and not improve a whole lot. I _LIKE_ that
I can GET or POST to a page, and the variables will still come from the
right place.
While considering the security angle, it's important to notice that
there is a tradeoff between a secure system and a functional system,
and that for some people, security just doesn't rate: either the
function (e.g. register_globals) is too valuable, or the downside of a
security failure is just not all that great. A lot of people prefer
function over security, and would find it an unwelcome arrogance if PHP
forced them to twiddle some settings to get it back.
Finally, a small note from my PHP programming experiences:
In order to code with E_ALL, idioms like this:
if ($x)
will produce warnings if $x is not set. If you don't want the
warnings, you have to replace it with:
if (isset($x) && $x) {
}
"if it's set and it's true"...? ugh.
One is then tempted to look for replacement functions in the
library, and immediately hits upon empty.
if (!$empty)
But as can be seen from the table at
http://bang.dhs.org/~svanegmond/logictest.php , empty()
returns TRUE if you hand it a boolean FALSE! Otherwise, the semantics
of empty() are a good replacement for the warning-generating cast to
boolean.
This tends to make E_NOTIFY more trouble than it's worth... which is
why people (including the Debian package maintainer) keep it disabled.
Thus I recommend that empty() be fixed to return false for boolean
values. Failing that, that a non-warning-generating logical
equivalent of cast-to-boolean be provided.
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