From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-07-30T16:31:11+09:00
Subject: Re: API changes in 1.8.0

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 11:07:03AM +0900, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 07:26:18PM +0900, Brian Candler wrote:
> > Has anyone written a summary of API changes between 1.6.8 and 1.8.0? If not,
> > I think that would be a *really* helpful idea.
> > 
> > I have just discovered that the [] method of CGI has changed:
> 
> I also made this discovery, when I upgraded mod_ruby to 1.8 and thereby
> broke my entire website.  Parts of which stayed down for two weeks
> because I'd missed them in my fix pass. :\

Maybe things have changed since you did that, because it's pretty clever
about it now: cgi['param'] returns an object which is a subclass of String,
and it has [], first and last methods. If you call any of those methods it
just returns the object itself and generates a warning.

Of course, if you *need* to accept multiple values for a particular form
attribute then it will break; but existing scripts which say cgi['param'][0]
do actually work.

> I admit that having cgi['param'] return one value is more convenient
> for most scripts, but it would have been nice to announce that change 
> somewhere.  Was there a post on this group about it that I missed?
> It's a major compatibility breaker.

I didn't see anything posted either.

Regards,

Brian.