Monday, 29 January 2007

PEAR vs PHP for PHP Bugs

Richard Thomas in his Cyberlot blog tries to find out whether PHP or PEAR is responsible for a bug that he has found. He also provides a solution to fix it. He lists out the bug in both PEAR and PHP:

Bug reported to pear
http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=9950

Same bug reported to PHP after PEAR said is a PHP issue
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40244

He says both PEAR and PHP are pointing fingers at each other and neither of them seems to be able to work together. He further explains and gives the solution by using an example code. He says by using PHP 5.2 having Pear Mail, Mail_mime and Net_SMTP installed then run the two blocks of code with all error reporting on including E_STRICT. The only difference between the two will be only if the last line of code is removed, than error_reporting will not be functional. A logical explanation would be that since there is no other code after that error_reporting call, the output would be exactly the same between the two pieces of code. But this is not the case as the first one outputs PHP E_STRICT errors the second one does not.

He reasons out as to whose fault is it—PEAR or PHP. The E_STRICT warnings themselves are PEAR but they can't get rid of them without killing PHP4 compact he says. He also provides that there should be a PHP4, a PHP 5 library and PEAR, which will be able to download the proper library during an install. This way they could keep PHP4 compact and E_STRICT compliant with each other.

He concludes that the issue though isn't PEAR and E_STRICT its more of a PHP issue and leaves on them to resolve it.