[development] Re: Seg fault in PHP (FormsAPI)? Can you reproduce?

[Rob Thorne]

Charlie,

While I'm as quick as anybody to say RTFM,  YDDB (You Dear Developer 
Bastard) to developers with um,  Dear Developer Questions,  there are 
three issues here that would help deal with this:

    * The docs on Forms actually *could* be easier to find and
      navigate.  AFAIK, there isn't a "developer's FAQ".  (and if there
      is:  it's not that well known, or I wouldn't be writing this,
      ja?).  This is a good one for such a doc.
    * Like it or not,  APIs are always abused, either through
      carelessness or ignorance.  It's a motherhood in software
      engineering:  any function or procedure needs to deal gracefully
      with bad input.  And there are many very good procedures (see:
      invariants) to test for bad input.  Generally, forms are not
      processed multiple times in a request, and if we can add code to
      form.inc to catch this, it will make the whole system more
      predictable.
    * Good "form debugging" tools aren't really available yet, or are
      not that well known to some of us doing 4.7 development.  The
      arrays created for Forms API  are generally static, and I've found
      that there are a variety of ways of detecting "bad data".  A
      "forms validate" API could be called via devel.module  or in
      debugging code, and would make these kind of bugs a lot more
      transparent.

Yellin' at us dumb developers has its satisfactions, and you've earned 
the right to do it more than most of us.  But if the goal is to reduce 
this type of developer problem, there just might be a technological 
solution here :-)

Rob
Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> You guys do not read the various documentation despite lots of efforts 
> went creating them.
>
> Have you read the form API reference where about every fifth line is a 
> warning about missing # signs? I won't look up the PHP manual page 
> where it mentions that if you omit a key then the key is actually 0 
> and obviously 0 is not something that begins with #.
>
> Also, core does not babysit broken code. But sometimes developers need 
> a crutch. It's provided for quite some time at 
> http://drupal.org/node/58355 .
>