> Yermo Lamers wrote:
>> I've not had alot of luck with reporting bugs through the bug tracker;
>> For instance see
>>
>>   http://bugs.php.net/31508
>>
>> where the guy claims PHP can't do recursion without crashing ... Ummm?
>
> To be fair, he is correct in what he says; PHP cannot do recursion
> beyond a certain level, because of limitations on stack size. He does
> not claim that PHP cannot do recursion; you are misrepresenting him..

Not to start a new thread but at this point in the conversation because
the PHP 5.0.3 bug is much more serious but in my own defense I was told:

"What you are experiencing is a stack smash caused by recurssion. This is
unlikely to ever be fixed and is a good example of why not to use
recursive functions."

Good example of why not to use recursive functions ... Ummm? I don't see
how I can misrepresent that.

You are correct that later in the conversation he corrected himself after
I replied. But to be fair I put alot of work into tracking this down this
far and it's a very serious bug that has nothing to do with recursion. It
just got dismissed out of hand; which is pretty much what has happened
with every bug report, every patch, etc that I've ever submitted going
back to PHP 4.0.

I certainly understand that there are countless bugs and thousands of
people with issues and very few of them are doing projects of the size and
scope that I am. In many ways, PHP is not an appropriate choice for my
project, but that's a separate subject. At the very least it would be nice
to not be dismissed out of hand; especially when I've taken the time to
clearly demonstrate an internal PHP buffer overrun error. I can't be the
only person experiencing these problems.

As far as I've been able to determine the PHP 4.3.10 bug is due to a
buffer overrun error having something to do with methods returning array
members and the caller incorrectly taking a reference to the returned
value ... 9 times out of 10 it makes the sit and spin/coredump problem go
away. If taking a a reference to a by-value is incorrect PHP it should
generate a warning. It seems to be correct since it'll work for the first
few hundred iterations .. and then randomnly crash depending on context,
which is why I haven't been able to produce a nice small script to
demonstrate it.

At least with --enable-debug turned on the coredump problems goes away and
it generates very nice buffer overrun errors.

Like I said, I haven't had much luck reporting bugs. No problem. I
understand they are very busy; and I'm willing to help if I can. But
showing no interest and dismissing serious bugs out of hand is a real
problem.

Right now the 4.3.10 bug isn't as critical as the 5.0.3 bug. That one's a
showstopper as the project I've been working on for the last 4 years (tens
of thousands of lines of code) can't run under 5.0 while this bug
persists.

Symbol table trashing bugs due to buffer management errors have plagued
PHP since the 4.0 days. I had held out hope they would be resolved in Zend
2; and I think the situation is improved but this "$this" getting lost
problem prevents me from upgrading.

What can I do to help to track these down and fix it/get them fixed?

-- Yermo

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