Missing signature violation warnings suck

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 11:30 CEST

Skien, Norway

I've been working on some code, while developing on PHP 5.3. The code resembles the following structure:

<?php
interface ezcSearchQuery
{
    public function limit( $limit, $offset = '' );
}
interface ezcSearchFindQuery extends ezcSearchQuery
{
}
class ezcSearchFindQuerySolr implements ezcSearchFindQuery
{
    public function limit( $limit = 10, $offset = 0 )
    {
        $this->limit = $limit;
        $this->offset = $offset;
    }
}
?>

No problems at all while development, no warnings, no errors. Now when I deployed this on a PHP 5.2 machine it bombed out, with the following correct message:

Fatal error: Declaration of ezcSearchFindQuerySolr::limit() must be compatible with that of ezcSearchQuery::limit() in /tmp/index.php on line 11

And this really sucks. I made a mistake in my code (wrongly implemented interface) and I get no warning (not even E_STRICT)... and then deploy it and it bails out on me. We can't have this. We need warnings (actually, it should be E_FATAL) for those cases in order to avoid problems. I don't know how this check got removed, but it should be put back in ASAP!

Shortlink

This article has a short URL available: https://drck.me/msvws-6ah

Comments

Marco Kaiser

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 10:18 UTC

this code throws a Fatal error under 5.2.5 and also under 5.2.6-RC3 for me so whats the problem?

Derick

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 10:40 UTC

@Marco: The problem is that there is no warning at all in PHP 5.3.

Lars Strojny

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 10:47 UTC

The problem is, that this has been changed in 5.3.

Noel Darlow

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 11:00 UTC

Actually there's nothing wrong with different parameters in an implemented method. It's something you won't want to do often but you will want to do it and so this categorically should not cause a fatal error. The language should not attempt to impose misguided rules upon us.

Martin

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 11:08 UTC

"while developing on PHP 5.3."

stloyd

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 11:09 UTC

@Marco: read, read and read again :P "while developing on PHP 5.3" != "when I deployed this on a PHP 5.2 machine" :)

Nicolas

Thursday, April 10th 2008, 05:54 UTC

It sounds like an interesting feature to me, in 5.3. It kind of brings about a BC break, and from that point of view, the different error levels sounds acceptable. That said, i guess this should be better signified as one of the 5.2 -> 5.3 migration tricks. And the question of having properly discussed this feature on the php core mailing list prior to implementing it is yet another issue :)

Add Comment

Name:
Email:	Will not be posted. Please leave empty instead of filling in garbage though!
Comment:	Please follow the reStructured Text format. Do not use the comment form to report issues in software, use the relevant issue tracker. I will not answer them here.
	All comments are moderated