Changes have been made in Git for this ticket:

Bug #10062: Workaround broken PHP servers returning Off for register_globals

  1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
http://git.horde.org/horde-git/-/commit/5fba617a376a816e29a6b34d71699b95642ed2e8

This shouldn't be problem at all. The expensive part (if at all) is 
calling ini_get(). Whether you test the result against one or two 
values doesn't matter.

Perfect, thank you for your time !

I *really* don't want to be parsing this value on every page load as a 
workaround.  Since the PHP manual is clear that 0 is the expected 
value (notwithstanding what the comments say), I would rather report 
this as a broken PHP installation somewhere in the test scripts 
instead and then tell the user they should change their php.ini value 
from Off -> 0.

Thank you for your detailed analysis, if this can be of any help I'm 
runnig Horde under the following environment:

- FreeBSD 8.2 amd64;
- PHP 5.3.6 with Suhosin-Patch, compiled from ports.

Though the comments on that page indicate that this is not true in all cases.

This seems to be a bug in PHP then, or actually in *your* PHP, because 
no one else seems to have this problem. From http://php.net/ini_get:
A boolean ini value of off will be returned as an empty string or "0" 
while a boolean ini value of on will be returned as "1".

Dear Sirs,

I'm using the very latest release of Horde Framework (4.0.2) under PHP 
5.3.6 and this check inside /lib/core.php fails:

if (ini_get('register_globals')) {
     exit('Register globals is enabled. Exiting.');
}

I've put the following lines before the check and the register_globals 
in the php.ini is OFF (I double checked also via phpinfo):

var_dump (ini_get('register_globals'));
exit;

The output is:

string(3) "off"

Am I missing something or maybe the check is expecting a numeric value 
instead of a string ?

Thank you,

Alessandro