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+====== Request for Comments: Error message formatting for development ======
+  * Version: 1
+  * Date: 2011-07-26
+  * Author: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>
+  * Status: Voting
+  * Related RFCs: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/newinis
+===== Abstract =====
+This RFC discusses the restoring of pre-PHP 5.3 functionality regarding the formatting of error messages. Prior to PHP 5.3, PHP had two bundled example .ini files: php.ini-dist and php.ini-recommended. In both cases the setting html_errors was not changed from PHP’s default (on). docref_root was left to “” (empty string).
+In PHP 5.3 two new .ini files were introduced: php.ini-development and php.ini-production. In the latter, html_errors was changed from PHP’s internal default to off.
+This RFC discussed the reversal of that change, so that html_errors is “on” by default again. It also suggests to only show documentation links if the docref_root setting is explicitly set to an HTTP path.
+===== Rationale =====
+The html_errors setting is used in PHP to add HTML formatting around error messages in a web environment. It adds some mark-up and a link to the documentation as well. Some PHP extensions, such as Xdebug, enhance this mark-up to provide an outstanding development aid.
+Most Linux distributions (if not all), force the use of php.ini-production, bundle that only variant or have php.ini-production as default. This means that for many users of such distributions the enhanced mark-up is no longer available by default, resulting in much confusion. Those distributions are just as much used for development as for production of course.
+A few examples of confused people:
+  * http://cloudfysh.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/php-xdebug-not-formatting-var_dump/
+  * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4534312/xdebug-var-dump-function-colors
+  * http://www.paoloiannelli.com/2011/04/15/solution-for-xdebug-not-overloading-var_dump/
+  * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2108576/unreadable-var-dump-output-on-snow-leopard
+  * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4678389/does-xdebug-beautify-var-dump
+There is also a PHP bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=54537
+It is also a FAQ for Xdebug: http://xdebug.org/docs/faq#format
+In a development environment you would want this setting "on" to aid developing. In a production environment you rather have errors not showing up, but instead logged to a file. For that, you would set display_errors to "off" and log_errors=/tmp/php-errors.log. **Because display_errors is already "off" in php.ini-production, the setting of html_errors to "on" has no effect, so it can quite safely be left "on"** instead of the current practise of forcing it "off" in php.ini-production. Not seeing any errors showing up is easy to notice so it’s much clearer that display_errors needs to be set to "on" in those cases. The default PHP HTML marked-up errors hardly differ from the non-marked-up ones so in cases where Xdebug is not present, this does hardly show up.
+The second thing to change is the way how the links to the documentation are shown whenever html_errors is set to "on". Right now, they are always shown even if the docref_root setting is not set (empty string). The reason behind changing this is to de-couple the html_errors setting from documentation links behind shown. Allowing for more configurability and a better experience for the PHP developer.
+===== Patch =====
+A patch is available at: http://derickrethans.nl/files/dump/docref-20110623.diff.txt
+===== Changelog =====
+  * 2011-07-26: initial version for discussion
+  * 2011-08-03: opened voting
+  * 2011-08-10: closed voting, RFC accepted 16 for and 0 against, patch committed
+===== Vote =====
+<doodle
+title="Do you want to revert back to html_errors=on by default " auth="derick" voteType="single" closed="true">
+   * yes
+   * no
+</doodle>

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