Laravel sometimes and require rule unexpected behaviour

I working on Laravel application. In UserRequest I am validating the input. The following rule:

'name' => 'sometimes|required|string|min:2|max:50'

fails if user name is not present although there is sometimes keyword present. The following request works fine though:

'name' => 'sometimes|string|min:2|max:50'

I am not the first one to experience this problem (see Laravel validation required rule not working).

However, documentation says that I should use the first option:

In some situations, you may wish to run validation checks against a field only if that field is present in the input array. To quickly accomplish this, add the sometimes rule to your rule list:

$v = Validator::make($data, [
    'email' => 'sometimes|required|email',
]);

In the example above, the email field will only be validated if it is present in the $data array.

(http://ift.tt/1USwF7I)

Does some know if that something I am doing wrong or a bug that needs to be reported?

via Chebli Mohamed