On 26/05/05, Brion Vibber <brion(a)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! ;)
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]