Hello,

During the Berlin hack-a-ton (which was an awesome event), I have added a quick hack to MediaWiki which is correctly marked as fixme. The revision I am requesting comments for is r87992:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/87992

Copy pasting the example from the commit message:

Example: $db->makeList( array( 'field!' => array( 1,2,3 ) ); outputs: 'field' NOT IN ('1', '2', '3' );

$db->makeList( array( 'foo!' => array( 777 ) ) ); outputs: 'foo' =! 777

The exclamation mark is an easy mark to have the condition negated.

Brion raised concerns: syntax is not obvious and lacking potentially useful feature. He recommends using full operators:

'some_field IS NOT' => null, 'some_value !=' => 23, 'some_ts >=' => $db->timestamp($cutoff), 'some_ts <' => $db->timestamp($cutoff),

Thus the proposed diff is: - 'field!' + 'field !='

I would appreciate if developers can comment on this feature, either on the mailing list or on the revision comment list.

NB: please note the 'field!' feature has been used in the code since there. Might need to have to fix them if we change the code.