Message: 10 Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 11:24:07 -0600 From: Nick Reinking nick@twoevils.org To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again Reply-To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org

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Only to meassure my expectations for wikipedia ;) But keep in mind that reusing serials is not part of the pg concept, but as far as I know mysql does. E.g. deleting articles may spend a serial.

Fair enough, I do believe you're right. Still, deleted articles are not terribly common, and I think we should design this with maximum performance in mind. If we hit some odd 1.8B articles in the future, we can always figure out a way to change it to serial8. :)

Speaking of maximum performance... I have a question concerning our implementation. What will be more important in the future, clean and efficient code, or backwards compatibility? Especially when you consider the reverse_timestamp hacks everywhere that won't be needed in MySQL4 (or PostgreSQL), I would think that we should just drop MySQL3 support (especially considering that it is easy to upgrade, and nobody will be using it in a year or two). But, maybe I'm crazy - anybody else have any comments?

-- Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN

In accordance with Lee Daniel Crocker's comments I would say, that you shouldn't really care that much about backward compatibility. As long as there are some scripts which can handle import/export from older versions (which you need to write anyways), this isn't really a problem. Of course people like me, who use wikipedia as their primary wiki becaus it is "so cool" will always know how to install, as long as the requirements are written down somewhere. So: Go for it. Upgrade your code Maybe use some kind of Database abstraction (Like http://php.weblogs.com/ADODB), also it might require some more hacks, you can in theory support nearly any DB backend.

Cheers Leo