[5.4] Why do service providers depend on helper functions?

[collegeman]

Dear Taylor and amazing Laravel community;

I'm working on some projects in which it is not possible to rely on core helper functions. The reason for this isn't trivial to explain, but I'll try to be concise. The codebase incorporates more than one Laravel-based application such that it is not possible to use Container::getInstance(), since more than one instance of the Container may exist in a single request.

Because of this constraint, it is also not possible to use the global helper functions, all of which rely on Container::getInstance() for accessing what would normally be the only container in the request.

The simple change I am requesting is that service providers, already having in ServiceProvider::$app the instance of Container that represents their relationship to the application in which they are configured and installed, should use that instance for accessing the Container's contents instead of invoking helper functions.

The specific case I have highlighted below focuses on Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider, but I believe there are other examples, including Illuminate\Database\DatabaseServiceProvider, Illuminate\Pagination\PaginationServiceProvider, and Illuminate\Scout\ScoutServiceProvider.

In addition to ending the practice of using helper functions within service providers, I would like to recommend that the usefulness of being able to pass a subpath argument to resource_path($path='') be refactored into the aliased function Illuminate\Foundation\Application::resourcePath() such that this convenience can continue even without the helper function in play.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Aaron

[collegeman]

Yay! <3