why use the @?

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

Pinning down a bug on a customer server lead me to removing an '@':

Warning: dir() has been disabled for security reasons (...)

The pesky line in question was:

$themes_dir = @ dir($theme_root);

But there's plenty of other calls to:

@ dir(...)

Why in the bloody hell would anyone want WordPress to silence this kind of error? It should spit something along the lines of "Your host sucks, change it now."

I agree. And I'll bet Podz agrees too. When we hide the sins of poorly configured servers, we make their shortcomings into WordPress shortcomings in the mind of the people using WordPress, and we create a support burden for something that isn't even our problem.

I disagree with just throwing the errors, because users will then blame WordPress for throwing those errors, generating just as much of a support burden.

Maybe it's an idea to include some kind of test during the initialization/install process. (Check if dir() is allowed, etc..)

+1 for making the checks before installing

Pre-flight checks in general are a good idea see #5235

We might want to close in deference to #5235, since that would fix this and a host of other pre-flight problems.

This ticket has had no real activity for over some time and has been partially superseeded by #5235, so closing as invalid for now.

Feel free to re-open if you have additional patches/information/suggestions/...