Alrighty... so... I've applied your patch and believe it'll work fine.
The other issue here is that TAPIr is using module_invoke_all() to call the table_alter functions. That won't accept/pass on arguments by reference, so I'm going to write a tapir_invoke_all() function that does. I'll post it up here when it's done... I'm also going to give this module some loving and post an update to d.o.
To get a better handle on references, just check out this code:
<?php
function func1(&$arg) {
unset($arg[1]);
func2($arg);
}
function
func2(&$arg) {
unset($arg[0]);
}
function
func3($arg) {
unset($arg[2]);
}
$a = array(
0 => 'zero',
1 => 'one',
2 => 'two',
);
func1($a);
func3($a);
print_r($a);
?>The result when run will be this:
Array
(
[2] => two
)
Basically, & receives a reference to the variable, so the function will use the variable itself instead of make its own local copy. Notice that func3() doesn't use the &, so the unset() affects only the copy of $a inside that function. It's somewhat akin to pointers in other languages.