[TYPO3-project-4-3] TYPO3 autoloader case sensitivity: your opinion please

[Francois Suter]

Hi all,

As you may have noticed, TYPO3's autoloader is case-sensitive while 
PHP's is not (see [1]). This is confusing because developers will expect 
the TYPO3 autoloader to be case-*in*sensitive too.

Looking into t3lib_autoloader, the problem is clear. In 
t3lib_autoloader::getClassPathByRegistryLookup(), there's the following 
line:

$className = strtolower($className);

but when the ext_autoload.php files are loaded, there's no check on what 
case was used.

There are two ways to solve that:

1) document the fact that class names must be entered all lowercase in 
the ext_autoload.php files (actually, there's no autoloader 
documentation at all, and this particular point would have to be a big, 
bold warning)

2) loop on all the entries in the ext_autoload.php file and apply 
strtolower on the class names (i.e. the array keys).

I don't know the best solution. Solution 1 is the easiest one and a 
badly spelled class name is quickly obvious. Solution 2 plays nicer with 
developers, but with an added overhead, especially since (as far as I 
can tell) the autoloader registry is not cached.

So I would rather go for 1. And you?

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch

[1] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=11871