Personally, I generally prefer log_errors and E_ALL in production. That said, there have been cases where it really wouldn't make much sense to log the errors on a web tier with many nodes.
Or, at least, it didn't make sense to *just* log the errors. But I digress. I believe Stas has made a good pragamatic argument for a reasonable use case that improves performance in common enough usage by people who do know what they are doing, and want/need the performance gain. The detractors have, largely, not been cogent, to be frank. The most reasonable have been to be careful not to rush this through without considering its effects on cases like X. To which Stas says, "Of course not. Don't use it in case X." I must say, however, that buried in Stas' use case, 3rd party, not-so-clean code, and realistic pragmatic installs thereof, is buried the rather large problem: Many people who do such a thing, do not really do a serious code-review of the 3rd party code. They toss it on there, it works, and they move on to the next task. I foresee a fair number of people who turn on error_mask, and then are defuddled by the 3rd party apps they never reviewed in the first place not behaving. Certainly, they are getting what they deserve, in some lights. But, to remain pragmatic, the PHP Dev Team has to be ready for an onslaught of issues and bug reports about 3rd party software in this state. As an example, before this feature rolls out, I'd have to suggest that the bug reporting page include it in things to turn OFF before a bug report is accepted, in that section about 3rd party extensions. This is just one example off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure there are more ramifications that go well beyond the code-based discussion so far. All that said: I am in favor of this patch, provided sufficient effort to be sure the community knows, in advance, loud and clear, it's not a cure-all and is meant only for code that can't/won't be fixed, rather than code that is in active development. In fact, I'd suggest that using error_mask should emit an E_STRICT, *not* suppressed by error_mask, before it kicks in. :-) -- Some people ask for gifts here. I just want you to buy an Indie CD for yourself: http://cdbaby.com/search/from/lynch -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
