Prevent potential PHP warnings when the fs_active_plugins option comes back with a non-object

[sc0ttkclark]

This is to address an issue a Pods user encountered here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/error-when-activating-pods/#post-14295661

[vovafeldman]

Thanks for the PR @sc0ttkclark. Why do you suspect it is related particularly to PHP 7.4+? Did you manage to reproduce it yourself?

It looks like a storage data corruption issue.

[sc0ttkclark]

I no longer have any idea why I thought it was a 7.4 issue. I'll remove that from the note on this.

As for a storage data corruption issue, I hope you're still willing to accept the PR as I believe Freemius needs to be graceful in breakages like this.

[vovafeldman]

Thanks for checking, @sc0ttkclark. I don't think that "muting" issues, including data corruption, is the way to go. Unexpected issues are symptoms of a problem that needs to be fixed (either in the SDK or the user's site). Without being aware of it, the site owner (or us) won't know about it. If WP wasn't self-hosted we could have automatically logged the error to our end and monitor unexpected issues, but unfortunately, in the self-hosted ecosystem, the site admin is the one that needs to know about them to report them forward. Also, theoretically, data corruption can happen on every load from the DB. Adding failover logic to every DB load isn't right, there should be some level of trust between the logic and storage about data integrity.

We are happy to investigate the issue for that particular user, you can direct them to our support.

[sc0ttkclark]

Look at the next line after my proposed change. Is that not muting a similar issue?

[vovafeldman]

The purpose of the next line is to set the property when the object is created for the first time (i.e, wasn't yet stored in the DB).