Hi
On 7/20/24 20:14, Deleu wrote:
Is there any evidence that PHP users are relying on code that:
- Was released just 7 months ago
- Was not documented
- Nobody knew about it until very recently
That is the wrong question to ask (see at the bottom).
And furthermore, why should undocumented, unintentional, unapproved change
to PHP be supported? Even if a handful of folks come to PHP's issue tracker
I do not see an issue supporting this from PHP's side. The issue was
raised by a user of PHP, not by a PHP maintainer.
The change has also been explicitly acked by Gina and Christoph before
Ilija committed it and Bob also participated in the PR without raising
concerns, so it's also not an unapproved change. The fact that none of
them anticipated this side effect, doesn't make it unapproved.
to complain, the answer is plain and simple: that behavior was not approved
by PHP's RFC process, which is the only way to get a behavior change
introduced into the language. Realistically, it's highly questionable that
This is false. Small self-contained feature additions do not need to go
through the RFC process. This is generally understood as "no one
requests an RFC being written". The deadline for such a request is not
defined as far as I know, but I believe it would be reasonable to assume
that it implicitly is no later than the release of the PHP version in
question, because otherwise any feature added this way would be at risk
of arbitrary removal.
such hypothetical users would even show up.
I agree, but you can't say this for certain.
Weighting "breaking end user programs with a syntax error in a patch
version" vs. "a power-user function emits unanticipated values in a
field containing free-form data, but still follows its defined
specification of emitting the token stream as PHP sees it", the former
clearly has a much larger possible impact.
Best regards
Tim Düsterhus
