On 26/05/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Aside from a sense of aesthetic pleasantness, I'm not sure what the actual benefit of merging these would be. Both imagelinks and categorylinks already have the properties of the pagelinks table: they remain valid and don't need to be updated when the source page is renamed or when the target is created, deleted, or renamed.
Well, I think the first time I heard it mentionned was in relation to the need for a separate "templatelinks" table, distinct from normal links - the argument being that it would make sense to have a flag saying what type of link was being stored rather than just creating more and more tables that were essentially identical whenever we needed to distinguish something from a "plain" link. However, there *are* subtle differences between the tables, such as the namespace validity you mentioned, and the need for category links to have a sortkey (and possibly an indexable namespace_from, see previous discussions), so maybe this isn't such an obvious step as it seemed at first.
In which case, I guess it's time to add a "templatelinks" table! ;)