Home » Database » DB » Bug #769

[2004-02-16 09:25 UTC] jocke at selincite dot com

Description:
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Hi,

This isn't really a bug as such, but more of a "misunderstanding" in the coding philosophy.
This strange behaviour occurrs when PEAR is not in the PHP-include path and DB.php is trying to include a DB-specific file (mysql.php, pgsql.php)

DB.php: DB::connect()
----
273 if (is_array($options) && isset($options["debug"]) &&
274 $options["debug"] >= 2) {
275 // expose php errors with sufficient debug level
276 include_once "DB/${type}.php";
277 } else {
278 @include_once "DB/${type}.php";
279 }
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If line 278 fails, there will be no error messages, and the whole DB-class and it's execution fails. This is a fatal error and, IMHO, should produce an error message no matter what error/debug level.

This behaviour occurred when I included DB.php manually with require_once(), without having anything other than "." in the include path. I was using Windows at that occasion. One strange thing is that since DB.php was included, the path from there should have been "DB/mysql.php" or "DB/pgsql.php", but that did apparently not work. This behaviour caused quite a bit of confusion, but was solved with adding PHP-dir to the include path. With an error message this could have been corrected immediately.

Thanks for your time.

/Jocke

[2004-02-16 09:51 UTC] jocke at selincite dot com

Setting the debug level is not the point of my submission. The point is that it's a fatal error that prevents the application from running, and thus, it should display an error message (regardless of debug level).

For example, if you ship code to a live environment you don't want (or should) be running debug-levels. The code should, however, inform you of fatal problems (especially if they are related to environment differences).