However are there any plans to add a symbol or something else so that a
PHP extension can detect the support for this feature at runtime?
Hmm... I'm not sure how to do it best for the extension. I checked core extensions and they don't use INI stages in a way that this change can break them, and if an extension would use new stage, it still would load with older PHP - even though the check for the new stage won't ever work, of course. If there's an extension which uses INI_STAGE_ACTIVATE and needs to support new htaccess stage, it can be fixed in source so check for this stage too - but I didn't see such extensions yet.
Now, if you do need to detect if the functionality at runtime and do something meaningful basing on its presence or absence - I'm not sure how to do it. Any ideas?
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com