The Interesting Installation Integer Problem

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 22:39 +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
> I would have thought that the latter could be made true without too much 
> effort by using our wrapper around DBI to look up a name in a table and 
> convert it.

	It's been the most intense effort of my Bugzilla career, actually. I've
been working on it for a week already.

> And it seems odd that databases claim to support SQL and yet don't 
> understand the defined data types...

	Yes. Feel free to talk to the MySQL folks about why their database has
hundreds of legacy customers whose lives would break into tiny bits if
the database started suddenly strictly supporting ANSI SQL. :-) And, of
course, we still support MySQL 3, which is a deprecated system. (Believe
me, I've run into MANY other interesting problems that have not been
discussed in the list, but just silently worked-around in Bugzilla or
during my development cycle.)

> Our code may be that scrupulous... but other people's might not. OK, so 
> we could claim that people hacking the database are on their own and 
> deserve what they get, but we haven't claimed that thusfar.

	Our code would never affect other people who hack the database. Their
schema would live separately from our schema. We're only concerned about
updating the tables, which is the same as what we've always done.

	The new method would not affect people who hack the database
themselves. At the least, it wouldn't change anything from how
checksetup currently interacts with those users.

	-Max
-- 
Max Kanat-Alexander
Technical Support Manager, USA
Kerio Technologies, Inc.
2350 Mission College Blvd., Suite 400
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Phone: (408) 496-4500
Fax: (408) 496-6902
http://www.kerio.com/support.html