Ged Haywood wrote: > Hi all, > > On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Geoffrey Young wrote: > > >>it's fun to track this kind of stuff down, even >>if we end up not changing anything :) > > > Shouldn't we in fact be changing something? > > My view would be that the dereferencing facility should be removed > from the standard build but left as a non-default compilation option > for those that need it to support old code. A message to STDERR to > the effect that the automatic dereferencing is not supported should > be enough to prevent confusion in the event that a reference were > accidentally passed to the print routine. It could even mention > this, er, newly discovered feature. :)
the danger here is changing the stable tree willy nilly. lots of people depend on mod_perl running exactly the way it does - every change we toss in going forward has the potential for having unforseen consequences and costing shops lots of money investigating new issues. I'm all for fixing bugs. however, if the bug is rare or obscure and can be easily worked around, or if it is the result of using a deprecated feature, I'm a little hesitant to alter the core at all. not entirely hesitant, mind you, but I feel as though we are required to be extra careful. so, with that in mind, I'd be far more likely to implement a simple change that fixed the broken "feature" (perhaps as rafael suggested) than to add lots of code that spits out new warnings or otherwise intentionally breaks running production code and forces shops to retrofit their codebase. --Geoff -- Reporting bugs: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html
