Ferenc Kovacs wrote on 28/01/2015 16:42:
On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Rowan Collins
<rowan.coll...@gmail.com <mailto:rowan.coll...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Ferenc Kovacs wrote on 28/01/2015 12:13:
E_DEPRECATED is likely to be even more ignored than
E_NOTICE, so
would be a step backwards; my whole assumption is that
most people
getting the message are not using a deprecated feature, but
accidentally mis-typing a constant or keyword. I'd be
happy with
raising it to E_WARNING to make it more noticeable,
though, if we
don't think removing the functionality is acceptable.
turn it into E_WARNING if we are planning to keep the feature,
turn it into E_DEPRECATED if we want to remove the feature
later on.
I see absolutely no advantage in changing this into E_DEPRECATED,
as it's even more likely to be hidden or ignored than E_NOTICE.
removing a feature (which is present in the language since 4.0,
probably even previously) without marking it deprecated first would be
a rude move imo.
so if we want to remove it, I can't see any other way.
The only documentation I can find mentioning it explicitly discourages
is it, so I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that it's already
deprecated, but if we feel that's not enough, we may not want to jump
straight to fatal. However, I don't think changing to E_DEPRECATED is
the only, or best, way of warning people of future removal.
(ofc. you can also try to detect this specific usage with static
analysis, but that would still miss dynamic usages like eval).
Actually, I was going to mention that it's quite hard to spot with
static analysis, because like classes and functions, you have to chase
includes to know what's defined. Unless you look for bare words which
aren't all caps, I suppose.
If we want to keep the string fallback for now, how about we raise
the severity to E_WARNING, and change the message to mention
deprecation?
e.g.
Warning: Use of undefined constant foo - assumed 'foo', but this
behaviour will change in a future version
I don't like mixing the deprecation notice in the string but maybe
it's just me.
I know it's unusual, but I think really there are two messages we're
expressing: "Warning: Undefined constant" and "Deprecated: Using
unquoted string". Unless we issue both at once (which seems
unnecessarily confusing), I think the higher of the two severities
should be used. But maybe that's just me, I'll see what others think.
Regards,
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]
