On 9/12/07, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Now it's all very well to say "fix whatever bug is causing this", but that might not be practical, and is in fact not necessary for the feature in question. We can just use some other special invalid title, one that is more specific to this feature. For instance, we could use (-3,'##FROMBLANK'). It has a negative namespace which could be reserved in Defines.php as say NS_LINKHACK. And it starts with two "#" characters, so it doesn't conflict with any potential links from parser functions or fragments.
Well, that's at least not going to confuse people too much, since it's fairly self-explanatory. This is the sort of thing you'd like to use a named constant for, but I guess we don't have those in MySQL, at least not without adding another column.
If we don't want to use the {category,page}links tables, by the way, why create another table that will amount to two booleans per page/category? Create a category table, which I think has been discussed anyway, and then add a boolean column or two to each of the category and page tables. Is there any point in adding two more 1:1 tables to store a couple of bits each?