Right now there's a few points:
* Minimum php versions are all over the source code, putting it in DefaultSettings.php or Defines.php would make be a good start, that way all hardcoded uses of the versions after those are loaded can be centralized. However there are many php-versions compared before those are included as well ( all (web) entry points and other files parsed before the inclusion of DefaultSettings and/or Defines).
So a better solution would be to get those versions available right at the beginning of the web entry points.
Possible solutions:
1) Instead of putting the define() or $wg...= in DefaultSettings.php / Defines.php, create namethisfile.php and put them in there and include it in the all entry points.
This seems like a simple and quick solution but introduces yet another always-included file and puts them far away from other global variables and defines.
2) Put it in Defines.php * make it independant (ie. only defines(), nothing else, as the filename suggests) * and move it up the call stack
Things like inclusion of UtfNormalDefines could be put in the places where Defines.php is currenty included[1] and assignment of the $wgFeedClasses variable shouldn't be in Defines.php anyway.
3) Just put them in DefaultSettings.php and Defines.php and replace all uses with the globals where they are hardcoded and available. Any uses before this file is loaded (entry points) can hard code it
The third solution is basically what I was going to do, and can be safely done. But before I do so I'd like to know if the solutions that cover all scenarios are do-able.
-- Krinkle
[1] UtfNormalDefines.php may not have to be moved though, looks good on second thought. It's included everywhere anyway so it doesn't save load by loading it later or earlier.
"Krinkle" krinklemail@gmail.com wrote in message news:E4C549E9-A115-4AFE-B030-3F57F2F9BB6B@gmail.com...
Right now there's a few points:
- Minimum php versions are all over the source code, putting it in
DefaultSettings.php or Defines.php would make be a good start, that way all hardcoded uses of the versions after those are loaded can be centralized. However there are many php-versions compared before those are included as well ( all (web) entry points and other files parsed before the inclusion of DefaultSettings and/or Defines).
So a better solution would be to get those versions available right at the beginning of the web entry points.
Possible solutions:
- Instead of putting the define() or $wg...= in DefaultSettings.php /
Defines.php, create namethisfile.php and put them in there and include it in the all entry points.
This seems like a simple and quick solution but introduces yet another always-included file and puts them far away from other global variables and defines.
- Put it in Defines.php
- make it independant (ie. only defines(), nothing else, as the
filename suggests)
- and move it up the call stack
Things like inclusion of UtfNormalDefines could be put in the places where Defines.php is currenty included[1] and assignment of the $wgFeedClasses variable shouldn't be in Defines.php anyway.
- Just put them in DefaultSettings.php and Defines.php and replace
all uses with the globals where they are hardcoded and available. Any uses before this file is loaded (entry points) can hard code it
The third solution is basically what I was going to do, and can be safely done. But before I do so I'd like to know if the solutions that cover all scenarios are do-able.
-- Krinkle
[1] UtfNormalDefines.php may not have to be moved though, looks good on second thought. It's included everywhere anyway so it doesn't save load by loading it later or earlier.
To add some context here, in r85918 I made some changes to our handling of old PHP versions. Coaxing the PHP 4 parser to even get as far as letting us die() is quite a challenge, and just about every file in the codebase is incompatible with it (structures like wfFoo()->bar() are invalid, for instance). However, PHP 5 versions are equally broken: no version of PHP < 5.2.3 that I tried (and I now have eight of them floating around :D) was able to load a page without a fatal error.
What I have done is to move the PHP version check from WebStart.php (which was unparseable since Tim added a try/catch block in r85327) to the entry points index.php, api.php, load.php. That way, only those files have to be PHP 4 compatible. It is definitely worth doing this despite the age of PHP 4, because the error message that previously resulted ("Parse error: unexpected T_CONST_FOOBAR" or somesuch) is so spectacularly unhelpful that people are far more likely to just give up in disgust than actually realise even what the problem is.
The issue this raises is that we now have the minimum supported PHP version hardcoded in at least six different places in the codebase. It would be nice to have it centralised in a define() constant, but any file that it's put in then needs to be kept PHP 4 compatible. The two options which stand out are either creating a new file for it, or putting it in Defines.php and moving that file to be included directly from the entry points, rather than from WebStart.php. The question is: are there any gotchas associated with moving that up the call stack?
--HM
On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
To add some context here, in r85918 I made some changes to our handling of old PHP versions. Coaxing the PHP 4 parser to even get as far as letting us die() is quite a challenge, and just about every file in the codebase is incompatible with it (structures like wfFoo()->bar() are invalid, for instance). However, PHP 5 versions are equally broken: no version of PHP < 5.2.3 that I tried (and I now have eight of them floating around :D) was able to load a page without a fatal error.
What I have done is to move the PHP version check from WebStart.php (which was unparseable since Tim added a try/catch block in r85327) to the entry points index.php, api.php, load.php. That way, only those files have to be PHP 4 compatible.
Do note though that there's no reason that all that PHP 5 code has to actually be in the entry point and WebStart.php files.
They could simply look like:
<?php // Check version compatibility; on PHP 4 try redirecting to index.php5, or on old PHP 5 whinge about incompat. require './includes/MWVersionCheck.php';
// The real code below may contain structures that can't be parsed by the older code, so sits in another file. require './includes/do_index.php';
Then the version checks and redirection logic can all be encapsulated in one place.
However it may be a reasonable simplification to drop the .php5 files and magic redirection for PHP 4, and just worry about index.php and the installer index.php detecting PHP 4 and throwing up an error message. Then only index.php needs to be PHP4-parseable, and the rest need only parse on PHP 5 and make it to the version check.
It should be a very rare case these days that .php files get run through PHP 4 by default with no way to change it; PHP 5 is many years old and very standard.
-- brion
Happy-melon wrote:
What I have done is to move the PHP version check from WebStart.php (which was unparseable since Tim added a try/catch block in r85327) to the entry points index.php, api.php, load.php. That way, only those files have to be PHP 4 compatible.
Don't forget about update.php and install.php
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