I saw the issue when you submitted it, but so far I had neglected to reply as I am unsure whether Xdebug is doing anything wrong here. I'm going to argue that it doesn't.

As Xdebug is a debugging tool, it should provide as much information as it can. When an IDE sets the -n notify_ok -v 1 it indicates that the debug engine may send the IDE notifications. These notifications are not necessarily restricted to error notifications (https://xdebug.org/docs-dbgp.php#error-notification), but can in the future also include breakpoint_resolved notifications (these are currently unimplemented in Xdebug today, but part of a future feature, as requested by the PhpStorm team).

The DBGp specification says:

When a language engine creates a debugging notification, the debugger engine MAY convert this to a DBGp notification.

The language engine (PHP) creates a debugging notice (including formatting, stack traces, etc) regardless of whether PHP outputs it to the screen. The decision to show debugging information is taken much later. This means that leaving many notices unfixed in your PHP script actually creates quite a slow down to begin with (even if Xdebug is not involved at all).

As a debugging notice is created, Xdebug decides to send it over the DBGp connection to the IDE, to point out that there is a mistake in the script. I would say that it should continue to do so.

Thank you for the answer!
Ok, it make sense.

We'll think how it should be fixed on PhpStorm side. Probably we should show error according to error level but notify user if there are too much hidden notifications and warnings.

Thanks Svetlana. I'll close the issue for now. If we can come up with a better solution in the future, then we can create a new issue for it.

cheers,
Derick

My colleague is currently looking how can we fix this issue on IDE side and we can't find a good way to find error reporting level for a current debug process.
If we try to evaluate "error_reporting()" on IDE side, we always get 0.

Is there more appropriate way to get the error_reporting level during debugging ?

To reproduce:
1) Create a PHP script

<?php

function sum($a, $b) {

return $a + $b;

}
echo error_reporting() . PHP_EOL;

error_reporting(E_ALL);

echo error_reporting() . PHP_EOL;
$a = 1 + 179;

echo $a . PHP_EOL;

2) Place a breakpoint on lines 7 and 12. In both cases, evaluating 'error_reporting()' will return 0.

xdebug.log:

...

[25705] <- eval -i 34 -- JEdMT0JBTFNbJ0lERV9FVkFMX0NBQ0hFJ11bJzkwZmI4NjBkLTgwOGUtNDRmOC1hMzk2LTM0N2RiZDkwNjU3OCddPWVycm9yX3JlcG9ydGluZygpOw==

[25705] -> <response xmlns="urn:debugger_protocol_v1" xmlns:xdebug="https://xdebug.org/dbgp/xdebug" command="eval" transaction_id="34"><property type="int"><![CDATA[0]]></property></response>

…

I'll have a look again.

I've found out why your eval statement returns 0: https://github.com/derickr/xdebug/blob/master/xdebug_handler_dbgp.c#L935 — Xdebug sets the error_reporting internally to 0 in case the eval command is used. I believe that's because I didn't/couldn't rely on eval always being used on correct PHP code, as it is user input (i.e., people can put random stuff in PhpStorm's watches, and I didn't want that then to show errors in their HTML output). Now the question is how to fix this.

This is now fixed in the xdebug_2_7 and master branches.

Is it possible that this bug is still unfixed in 2.8?

I´m debugging with IntelliJ Ultimate 2019.2 and Xdebug 2.8.0 on Windows PHP 7.3 x64 (VC15).
The problem I´m facing is described here:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-43921

IntelliJ outputs a lot of garbace (NOTICEs) when in debugging mode - despite it should not...

@cljk Your comment is unrelated to this report. This report is about error_reporting() returning the wrong value.

The youtrack issue that you linked to explains why these extra notices are not a bug in Xdebug.