Yahoo geocoder returns fatal error/stops payment during contrib & event payments if server is down

The Yahoo geocoder stops execution and displays a fatal error if the geocoder can't connect to yahoo for any reason--such as internet connectivity problems or the yahoo web site is down for any reason.

This creates a serious problem for process contribution, event, or membership payments, because the fatal error causes the contribution processing page to halt with a fatal error. So credit cards are never processed and payments are not completed if this error occurs.

It is a subtle one to track down, because many payments are processed without a problem (whenever Yahoo is up & running with no problem) but a certain percentage of people trying to make a payment are unable to complete it successfully.

The solution is pretty simple--just the Pear error handling routine needs to be set to status PEAR_ERROR_RETURN so that the error can be logged etc without stopping execution.

Here is a possible fix for civicrm-core / CRM / Utils / Geocode / Yahoo.php about line 127:

require_once 'HTTP/Request.php';
PEAR::setErrorHandling(PEAR_ERROR_RETURN);
$request = new HTTP_Request($query);
$request->sendRequest();
$string = $request->getResponseBody();

Here is the link to the documentation for PEAR setErrorHandling():

http://pear.php.net/manual/en/core.pear.pear.seterrorhandling.php