That is a stellar response Dan, Thanks for being so clear. I had a feeling
that this might be the case so we'll have to work around it.
Just for clarity and posterity I provided the simplest test case in the
original email not the actual problem. In Drupal this isn't just one place
though becase, we have a library(and by library I mean class) for parsing
information out of exceptions. So we would have to do quite a bit more
hackery then that to to keep type hinting.
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 8:59 PM, Dan Ackroyd <dan...@basereality.com> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> On 31 March 2015 at 21:51, James Gilliland <neclim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > By design, \EngineException does not extend \Exception so code doesn't
> > accidentally catch this special type of exception. ...
> >
> > I don't know if this is all acceptable and/or by design but it is awkward
> > so I wanted to bring it to the list to discuss.
>
>
> Let me try to explain why the BC break at the top level is the right
> choice.
>
> The change in the Exception hierarchy has to cause a BC break to exist
> 'somewhere', as errors in code that were previously not throwing an
> exception, but in effect just doing exit() are now throwing an
> exception. This is a change in behaviour that cannot be handled
> without some sort of BC break.
>
> There are two types of places where \Exception are currently being caught:
>
> i) in the middle of applications where some library is being called
> where all exceptions need to be caught and changed to a more specific
> exception.
>
> function foo() {
> try {
> someOtherLibrary();
> }
> catch (\Exception $e) {
> throw new OtherLibraryException(
> $e->getMessage(),
> $e->getCode,
> $e
> );
> }
> }
>
>
> ii) At the top level of the application where all exceptions are being
> caught, so that they can be logged and a more graceful error message
> than a stack trace can be shown to the user.
>
> If the BC break was for (i) by making all of the new exceptions be
> under the hierarchy of \Exception, it would result in a lot of BC
> break spread out across applications.
>
> Having the BC break in (ii) is pretty strongly preferable; it means
> that there are just a few (or one), easy to find places in an
> application where the code now needs to be changed from catching
> \Exception to catching \BaseException (or whatever it will be after
> the exception tidy up).
>
> Drupal (or any other application) can handle this BC break reasonably
> easily by either dropping the type from the parameter of
> _default_exception_handler or by adding a version check around it's
> declaration like:
>
> if (PHP_VERSION_ID >= 700000) {
> function _default_exception_handler(\BaseException $e) {
> }
> }
> else {
> function _default_exception_handler(\Exception $e) {
> }
> }
>
> Yeah, this isn't the most awesome thing ever to have to do, but imo it
> sure beats having to change code in the middle of applications.
>
> cheers
> Dan
>
