Make Drupal 6 E_ALL compliant.

Any E_ALL notice has for a long time been considered a bug by the green team (core commiters). Any properly reviewed patch fixing an E_ALL notice has been committed.

E_ALL compliance is important for many reasons, among which: it is easier to write bug-free code (I noticed some bugs that could have been avoided this way) and in some Apache setups, too many notices are overwhelming the servers (I have seen reports of people complaining about that).

The problem is the pace at which patches fixing E_ALL notices are committed is not quick enough: at each release cycle, huge patches are committed that are full of such errors, and the next release cycle is not enough to correct them all. Today, as we open HEAD for Drupal 6 development, there remain scores of such notices from the 4.7 FAPI patches, and even more from the huge patches committed during the D5 development cycle.

The beginning of a release cycle is the best time to commit the simple patch attached. The next two weeks after committing this patch will be mostly spend fixing the most obvious notices (I will help). Thereafter, we can be sure that the D6 mega-patches will not introduce yet more E_ALL notices. This way, we have a whole release cycle to clean HEAD.

This patch will ensure that contrib modules are also coded to a higher standard, and bugs that could be easily avoided this way will stop cropping up in the first place.

so NOW is the time to commit this simple patch. If it isn't, I am afraid that Drupal shall never be E_ALL compliant (because much more bugs are introduced at each release cycle than are fixed).

I hope this will not degenerate into a flame war :)