There's no mention of why these modifications are necessary, but instrumenting the snapshotted adodb library for debugging purposes is something that should only be present in beta status.
I'm filing this as a ticket so we don't forget to revert these changes before anyone proposes moving to rc status.
I still think it is better to let the library trigger the inconvenient but valid exception, and handle the code in your catch block.
It would be much better to add a few lines of code duplicating adodb functionality in a catch block than to modify the external library source. The first way is robust documentation of an error condition, the second way is 'technical debt', which must be balanced with additional deferred effort.
If there's something that inavoidably must be changed in an external library (such as a bug fix), lobby the library maintainers to incorporate the change upstream. It is in that case not uncommon to snapshot a library based on a prerelease version, which can be removed once the library has a new release incorporating the change.
Changesets releated so far: r7685, r7755, r7814
