Ged Haywood wrote:Hello.
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
IMHO It's better to use complex solution: fix bug reported by Rafael + warning about
deprecation in logs when refs are used with print. Then after two or three releases make it obsolete at all.
Also if mp2 already don't allow such magic then this feature have to be marked deprecated for more
compatibility and to keep people from using it, especially those who haven't look at mp2 yet(like me).
Best regards. Ruslan.
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