Custom fields schema

[Christopher Hicks]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Christopher Hicks wrote:
>> One other red herring that I'm tired of seeing is that we're stuck with a 
>> bad implementation and that another lump of checksetup.pl tweaking can't 
>> move us to another way of doing things. 
>
> Without commenting on any of the other issues, I don't see this as a red 
> herring. While in theory it's probably true that one could convert from 
> FAC to FAD using checksetup.pl, in practice such a thing is more complex 
> than any other dynamic schema change we've ever tried, and would be hard 
> to write and liable to fail in unexpected ways due to the "meta" nature 
> of custom fields and the fact that we can't predict what people will use 
> them for. It would never happen.

Bah.  I don't think the meta nautre of custom fields changes the fact that 
FAC and FAR are two different ways to represent the same thing.  There's a 
one-to-one correspondance between them and calling it "hard" to convert 
doesn't make it so.  I'm not saying it would be a trivial task, but it 
strikes me as being pretty straight forward and something that anybody who 
has experience dealing with nontrivial databases could do without agony.

> I certainly agree that endless debate is bad - but the correct way to 
> deal with endless debate is for the person charged with ending it to 
> bring it to an end. Dave should step up and make a decision - FAC or 
> FAD. The fact that one has an implementation available is certainly a 
> factor in that decision, but should not by itself be conclusive.

It seems that Dave is working on that.  Yay!

-- 
</chris>

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