On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 01:28:31AM -0800, Brion Vibber
wrote:
5) Why is
a broken link table necessary? Couldn't it be sufficient to
do a query to find out which links are broken? Or is this another "we
have no subqueries" issue?
I believe the primary use of the brokenlinks table is for generating the
'most wanted' list.
All articles have ID numbers; that's cur_id in the cur table. bl_from
and l_to reference cur_id numbers. Articles that don't exist don't have
cur_id numbers of course, so cannot be referenced by id, but only by
title.
What if there were no "broken links", only articles that had no text?
ie, the text field would be NULL? And we could do with a single "links"
table by collapsing article and image links together. And one could
find the "dangling links" simply by searching for those articles with
the text property set to NULL. The following query would do the trick:
We do distinguish between articles that have been never created and articles
that are currently blank, and we need to.
Not that this is necessarily a bad idea, but I'd want to be very clear
if/how this would alter current functionality.