The idea of a string port is probably semantically wrong, but it actually follows the convention of at least some web servers ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] is actually a string). And since the $port variable is used as a string in getHttpHost(), it's correct to allow the types not to match.
Some explanations on how it works now:
* The Session is an optional dependency of the Request. If you create the
Request yourself (which is mandatory now in the front controller) and if
you don't inject a Session yourself (which is recommended if you want the
session to be configured via dependency injection), the Symfony2 Kernel
will associate the Session configured in the Container with the Request
automatically.
* When duplicating a request, the session is shared between the parent and
the child (that's because duplicated requests are sub-requests of the main
one most of the time.) Notice that when you use ::create(), the behavior is
the same as for the constructor; no session is attached to the Request.
* Symfony2 tries hard to not create a session cookie when it is not needed
but a Session object is always available (the cookie is only created when
"something" is stored in the session.)
* Symfony2 only starts a session when:
* A session already exists in the request ($_COOKIE[session_name()] is
defined -- this is done by RequestListener);
* There is something written in the session object (the cookie will be sent
to the Client).
* Notice that reading from the session does not start the session anymore (as
we don't need to start a new session to get the default values, and because
if a session exists, it has already been started by RequestListener.)
This fixes a bug in UniversalClassLoader when attempting to autoload class names with leading slashes:
$namespacedClass = "\\Foo\\Bar";
$pearlikeClass = "\\Foo_Bar";
$namespaced = new $namespacedClass();
$pearlike = new $pearlikeClass();
`UniversalClassLoader::loadClass()` was unable to load PEAR-like classes with leading slashes because it found the slash and assumed that the requested class was namespaced. It was unable to load namespaced classes with leading slashes because it would look them up in the autoloader's registered namespaces, and was unable to match '\Foo' to 'Foo'. One (ugly) workaround for the namespaced classes was to register all namespaces twice:
$loader->registerNamespaces(array(
'Foo' => __DIR__ . '/lib',
'\Foo' => __DIR__ . '/lib',
));
But that's not very pretty, nor does it solve the bug with PEAR-like classes. Stripping the leading slash before trying to autoload allows UniversalClassLoader to load both namespaced and PEAR-like classes.