Results of testing ZF against PHP 5.4.0RC1

Greetings! My team and I (which means Ralph Schindler and Enrico Zimuel) took some time this week to: * Build PHP 5.4.0RC1 and run make tests (and send feedback) * Run Zend Framework 1.11 unit tests against PHP 5.4.0RC1 * Run Zend Framework 2.0 (dev) unit tests against PHP 5.4.0RC1 We found the following issues when running the tests, and I've ordered them starting with those that affect us most. Overall, however, 5.4.0RC1 largely worked out of the box. * Array to string conversion notices break tests In 5.2 and 5.3, array to string conversions raise no notices, and as such allow the tests to continue to run. Now, however, a notice is raised, and PHPUnit then raises an error. While I understand we should likely test values before using them in string contexts, this feels like an arbitrary change at this time. I recall from earlier discussions that Stas was in favor of reverting this change -- what's the status at this time? This single change will likely require a fair bit of time for us to fix across our ZF versions if not reverted, and I suspect it will hit a lot of other projects. * ob_get_status(true) does not always return an array One of our cache adapters uses ob_get_status(true) to determine things like nesting levels. However, despite the fact that we're passing the boolean true value to force return of an array, we get a non-array when the output buffer is empty now -- and this is true only of 5.4.0RC1. With the $full_status argument, I'd argue this should _always_ return an array, even if that array is empty -- which is precisely how it's documented. I see no reason for the change in 5.4. * ob_get_clean() now raises a notice if no buffer to delete Prior to 5.4.0RC1, if there were no buffers left to delete, ob_get_clean() was silent. It now raises a notice -- which, when using PHPUnit, means an error is now raised, making the test fail. I do not see any benefit to raising the notice; if there's nothing left to clean, return an empty string or false (which was the former behavior, and is documented). * Redefining a constructor with different arguments now results in E_FATAL Prior to 5.4.0RC1, if a concrete class added arguments to a constructor defined in an abstract class, no warning was raised. This behavior now results in an E_FATAL. I'm ambivalent about this change, however -- the code that raised this for us should be changed anyways. However, I'll argue, as others have on the list, that constructors should have the flexibility of redefinition without raising notices or compilation errors. * Introduction of the new keyword "callable" means that this can no longer be used for classnames, function names, or method names. We had one case where a "callable()" method was defined, and this now breaks; fortunately, it's only in tests, so we can easily fix it with no BC issues on our part. I'll note that I've also used the class|interface name "Callable" in the past on other projects. I'm okay with this change, but it needs to be clearly spelled out in the migration docs. -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney Project Lead | matthew@zend.com Zend Framework | http://framework.zend.com/ PGP key: http://framework.zend.com/zf-matthew-pgp-key.asc