[Mediawiki-l] AuthPlugin always fails with fatal erroron initialauthentication

[Brion Vibber]

Carlton B wrote:
> Well, in this case I guess we've just got different things going on, because
> I didn't override AuthPlugin::initUser and I didn't modify
> LoginForm::initUser or tamper with SpecialUserlogin.php in any way.  The
> only way I could get AuthPlugin to do an autocreate without throwing the
> fatal error was by overriding AuthPlugin::initUser to return the reference
> to the user it was passed.

Can you confirm that you made no other changes to the code? Have you
followed the execution path to make sure there's no other place that's
using the return value? Have you confirmed that the return value is used
by checking for the returned value?

 >   I wonder if your reproduction was accurate,
> because this is a tricky bug - even though it does throw a fatal error, the
> new user account indeed does get created, and the problem will not repeat
> itself as long as the user exists in the MW database.

That's exactly the reproduced behavior, yes.

> I have gone back through your code explanation and I can't find any fault
> with it.  The only remaining possibilities I can think of are:
> 1) Some method of the User class is setting the object to null in
> LoginForm::initUser
> 2)  PHP is getting its namespace confused and calling LoginForm::initUser
> instead of AuthPlugin::initUser on line 254 of SpecialUserLogin.php.
> Perhaps it's my version of PHP.  I am on php 4.3.11.

Are you using any PHP accelerator plugins? If so, which and what versions?

> Frankly I do not trust PHP 4's OO strategy to correctly handle any remote
> similarities in the namespace, so maybe renaming the AuthPlugin::initUser
> interface to something else show this to be the case.   Is this interface
> widely referenced elsewhere, can I safely rename it on line 254 of
> SpecialUserLogin.php and then change it to the same in my AuthUser
> extension?

Have you tested this? Does it in fact help?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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