Re: PHP5 only sure .. E_STRICT?

Hi, On 7/12/06, Michael Wallner <mike@php.net> wrote:

The answer to this question is no, we cannot rely on this. After the obviously heated debate with Marcus we talked in a query in the language of love (also known as german) and we got to a solution that I think is workable for us. After thinking more about the issue yesterday, I must admit, that limiting E_STRICT changes to major versions is really not reasonable for PHP development and it could cause a development deadlock.

What is a development deadlock is the addition of E_STRICT cases for some pedantic reasons and between two patches releases (5.1.x to 5.1.x+1).

All E_STRICT notices would start with an easily parseable string that defines the version in which the given E_STRICT notice was added. This would make it possible for us to provide a filter function that people could use in customer error handlers that would enable them to filter out any E_STRICT error messages they wish to ignore based on the lowest PHP version they want to care about. Marcus just introduced me to this idea and I think it's actually a quite good compromise.

Is he asking any php dev to parse a error string to see if he should actually care about it? That's ugly. Anyone notion of QA process will tell you that doing such changes in patches release is insane. Anyway, I did not see any discussion on internals about this idea. My point is still that E_STRICT should not be added in patches releases (5.1.x to 5.1.x+) but only in some minor releases. And many of these changes are for pedantic reasons (read to apply some strictness to some OO paradigms, for example). The argument about "you don't deploy on dev box" is irrelevant, if we cannot develop using E_STRICT (too many additions, too often, inconsistency between patches releases making impossible to run an app), why a developer should care about E_STRICT? I would not. However there is cases where E_STRICT additions are required, to warn about a possible bug for example, in this case we should fix our code as well. But this is obvious. Cheers, --PIerre