This is what I tried to do today ... after getting rid of safe-mode-get-uid-stress yesterday and apache-2.0+php-4.2.x-trouble that day before, which tooks me several hours each ... 

Well, I used to call dba_open and got some well known error saying "driver initialization failed". It's quite okay for that.

Browsing your bug report system indicates, that this failure isn't fresh, but was told to be done in CVS for 4.0.1 or something around that version.

Now, it took me several hours again to first browse your site, the rest of internet, the sources of PHP and DB3 and test around with several things before I came to the point in code, where I had to install some error reporting into your sources to find out why dba_open finally failed ...

Well, I've reported several non-significant bugs to your system before and always tried to bring up the patience to make it as easy as understandable for you what went wrong here at my systems.

Some reports can't be supplied with detailed information without spending another lot of hours - which I can't effort, too, because of "economic needs" - in testing, searching and solution-offering. All I get is some automatic message saying, you can't do anything without further details, linking me with some explanation of what you would like a bug report consisting of and finally making my report a "bogus" one ...

I really understand all your stress and that PHP isn't fulltime for you and I pay full respect to this all, but sometimes I don't feel like being handled in a similar way by you ... what about some better documentation, more specific and even more "professional". And if not being better documented, what about more detailed error reporting mechanisms????

In the example given up there your code responds with "driver initialization failed" on any problem the handler's open-method encounters and reports by some boolean result. The other end point of the underlying calling chain - db3's open-method supplies detailed error messages - which I would like to get instead of that nonsense warning.

To me it's like reporting you: Hey, my PHP isn't working.


While expecting your time to be wasted with that request or its realisation, I hope it could influence a bit the way of coding several extensions (which rely on external libraries - like dba does) in the future ...

Thanks for your attention!