Why false is sometimes true

We have some specialists in our admin staff, only able to administrate LDAP via phpLDAPadmin. But for several days the connection to the LDAP servers was read-only. It took some time to figure out why.

The configuration in /etc/phpldapadmin/config.php is very extensive, so I always ignored the failure in the following line:

$servers->setValue ('server', 'read_only', 'false');

Do you find the crap? If I comment it out the session isn’t read-only anymore. First we thought of a bug and I started to check the source code, but some more considerations let me have an idea. You might know PHP (like some other languages) interprets everything that is not empty or false explicitly as to be true. So 'hello' , 'true' and 'false' are all true ;-)

Don’t know who inserted this line, but sometimes (or generally?) you just work to correct the work of somebody else…