Am 09.03.2026 um 14:36 schrieb Gina P. Banyard <[email protected]>: > I don't see how going through an E_WARNING phase is helpful, rather I see it > as detrimental. > Foremost, what is the behaviour of introducing a warning? > Do we exit early and return false? > Or do we just warn and continue to use a possible default or nonsensical > value?
in all the previous cases where we deprecated things we continued to leave the behaviour unchanged apart from issuing the warning. > AFAIK every time a warning got introduced it followed the first approach, so > this doesn't seem to address the concern of giving developers more time. Replace E_WARNING in your phrasing with E_DEPRECATED and your statement becomes obviously false. If that's the differentiator for you then I'm happy to have an E_DEPRECATED phase before throwing a ValueError exception. > However, if we do continue using the prior behaviour then we haven't solved > the concern in the slightest. > As it may be a warning for one PHP version and in the next PHP version the > extension supports a new flag which removes the warning for that value, > leading back to a silent BC break if the warning wasn't addressed. Nothing can protect you from old code using a new flag by accident. Imagine someone skipping the version with the ValueError and going directly from 8.5 to the version with added flags. That's not the scope here. > Then comes the topic about how long should it be a warning? Until the next > major? A single release cycle? I don't want warning promotion to become the > same exhausting discussion that deprecation duration already is. In my view it is *exactly* the same as deprecations and should be handled as such. I'm on your side here that I don't want yet another process and that's why I'm advocating the IMHO tested and proven solution we are using for deprecations. > I have no idea how you handle hosting, but when I used shared hosting in the > past I would never have anyone tell me that my code was producing warnings or > notices. > And even the one website I manage for someone which is on OVH shared hosting > I can still select a PHP version (heck even downgrading to 5.4 for some > reason). > So I'm struggling to see how for the average end user this is impacting them? I'm supporting applications running on hosters where they bump the minimal supported version quite often. "Works for me" is hardly ever a strong argument... Regards, - Chris
