Re: Deprecate PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE [Proposed RFC]

On Wed, Sep 6, 2023, at 2:53 PM, Kamil Tekiela wrote: >>Do you think there is still demand for such error mode control features? >> >>Personally, I've never seen anyone prefer silent mode, so I think it's worth >>making the drastic change. > > This may be right. There isn't a demand for this in **new** code and I > doubt anyone would come forward with a reason to use silent mode now. > However the purpose of keeping this mode is to enable old legacy code > to run without major refactoring. This is the practice coming from the > days before PHP 5 when using exceptions wasn't common. Plenty of > applications are still running code designed 20 years ago because PHP > keeps as much backward compatibility as possible. The code would > benefit from modernization, but this would require a lot of effort > from its maintainers. > > We may get away with deprecating and removing PDO silent/warning mode > because it's an extension that was introduced in PHP 5 and everyone > was on board with using exception mode. We probably cannot remove > silent mode for other extensions that either mimic older extensions > that didn't use exceptions (e.g. mysqli) or have been introduced > before PHP 5. The reason is that people designed their code using > silent mode and removing it now would cause some serious headaches. > > Another point to consider is that PDO had silent mode as default for a > long time. You may be surprised, but many people weren't aware that it > can throw exceptions. My guess is that's a very small proportion of > all projects though. With PHP 8.0, they just slapped one line of code > and called it a day. Having said that, I think removing PDO's silent > mode is possible soon, even in PHP 9.0, but we may anger some people. > > All warning modes can be deprecated in PHP 8.4 and removed in PHP 9.0. > Silent mode of other extensions should be carefully reviewed one by > one. Deprecation in PHP 9.0 and removal in PHP 10.0 might be a better > option. I would also be fine with deprecating and removing the old/useless error modes, but only if there's a long enough deprecation period. I question if 8.4->9 would be sufficient. I'd be more comfortable with deprecating them now and removing in 10. --Larry Garfield