Fixes for deprecated assignment of new objects by reference

[technosailor]

SimplePie does a whole lot of instantiation of classes by reference which is now deprecated in PHP 5.3. Though I don't want to do a lot of patching on an upstream library, I think this is an important thing to fix in WP 3.0.

These are necessary for PHP 4 compatibility, as objects in PHP 4 are copied unless passed by reference. We uses this throughout core and deliberately suppress E_DEPRECATED (even when WP_DEBUG).

WP 3.2 now requires PHP 5. It would be appropriate to upgrade simplepie to their master branch now.

1.3-dev (the master branch) is unstable, so I wouldn't update to it yet. It's very unlikely that there will be more bugs, but the library has been somewhat reorganised, so it's possible that more bugs will have been introduced.

Fixes all instances of deprecated assignment by reference of new objects

Hi everyone, I've attached a patch against current trunk to correct all instances of new objects being assigned by reference.

Updated: Fixes all instances of deprecated assignment by reference of new objects

Apologies, first patch was incomplete. Corrected patch attached.

Changed issue summary as this now addresses all instances of assignment of new objects by reference and therefore fixes the remaining E_DEPRECATED warnings.

Can this make it into 3.3?

From my point of view, WordPress having a customised version of SimplePie makes it much harder for me to maintain, so I'd prefer to avoid that.

1.2 would most likely be fine to use, but it doesn't have as much testing as I'd like. In addition, it has quite a few backwards incompatibilities. If you'd like to roll that into 3.3, I'll see if I can get some more tests in the mean time.

Wordpress already uses Simplepie 1.2. How do these fixes make things harder to maintain?

From my point of view, deprecated PHP4 code like this makes it harder to maintain modern code because it interferes with tests and obviously may break future versions of PHP.

Sorry, I meant 1.3. This is what I get for writing comments before I'm awake. :)

1.3 is the development version, and the first to drop PHP 4 compatibility. It also features major changes (internally, and a few to the API), so I'd like to actually release it before it gets used.

We don't hack external libraries for things like this, so let's exclude TextDiff and SimplePie from the patch.

Optionally, check to see if TextDiff has been updated upstream.

Replying to nacin:

We don't hack external libraries for things like this, so let's exclude TextDiff and SimplePie from the patch.

Optionally, check to see if TextDiff has been updated upstream.

I can understand not wanting to fork functionally from a 3rd-party library so that patches don't have to be maintained, but this is a small compatibility fix that is essentially incorporated in newer versions of both libraries. It fixes a current issue without breaking anything and will not have to be forward-ported if the included versions are updated in the future, so where's the harm?

Maintaining a forked version of an external library is an extra burden we'd rather not deal with, especially for suppressed notices that have no real effect. It'd be a better use of time to go through with upgrades to newer versions of both libraries.

Closed #12709 as a duplicate.

set_magic_quotes_runtime() (used in PclZip and PHPMailer) is also deprecated.

Duplicate of the SimplePie part: #20139

Related: #21183

This is even fixed in TextDiff now, (although there are 5 lingering instances of a callable with &$this, but not an issue)