_REQUEST and variable_order

Hi! This topic was already discussed here but never arrived to a conclusion, so I will raise it again. The Problem: We have $_REQUEST superglobal, which is often used to abstract GET/POST requests. However, in most cases we do not want GET/POST variables to mean the same as cookie and environment variables. We can avoid that by setting variables_order to 'GP' but then we lose _SERVER and _COOKIES which still can be very much useful. We cannot also reliably use something like 'CGP' since while it won't allow cookies to override GET/POST we still have no way of not accepting cookie that has no matching GET/POST. I think this should be cleaned up so that _REQUEST behavior would conform its use case. The proposal(s): 1. One way to fix it is to create a new .ini request_order that would control just _REQUEST. 2. Other solution would be to keep variables_order but drop 'C' parsing from _REQUEST - i.e. make _REQUEST never include cookies. I don't know how many people really need cookies together with get/post in REQUEST. 3. Yet another solution would be to make superglobals independent of variables_order - i.e. _COOKIE would always exist even if variables_order doesn't have the letter. I actually don't see any reason having JIT to remove any of the superglobals - if you don't use them, with JIT you don't pay for them. And with COOKIES it's not that it would be a big cost anyway - how many cookies could you have? Of course, it'd be more substantial change which could break some apps relying on some quirks of current behavior. So, what do you think on this? -- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com