Hi!
. So you probably could lose the patronizing attitude ;)
What is patronizing? Is that "give encouragement" as dictionary tells? Sorry, I will encourage people further ;-p As you remember, I engaged into discussion and resolved issues in it. Of course, I don't know all schema issues completely (haha, its not my work!), so I consult with people around, thanks for helping, by the way.
But whenever I spot anything wrong, going into defensive stance will never help. Going into cooperative and communicative stance helps a lot.
Adding dummy rows defies the name/definition of the table, and it thus becomes harder for other devs to figure out (especially if dummy rows are not mentioned in the help/MW.org stuff, which I suspect they wont be).
Would having NULL instead of '' be less cryptic? :) Cause then, if followed literally, it would mean: "I don't know about any categories/ links the page is in". We actually discussed that, and quite a few people chose ''. And mw.org/help is editable, if anyone needs to understand what empty categories mean :)
This is trunk change, it had entry in RELEASE NOTES. Who is not reading RELEASE NOTES?
It's annoying as hell to have to review patches/fix bugs/add features to cryptic code.
What makes adding empty category rows cryptic? Of course, not having that code at all helps a lot - nothing to fix, nothing to review, no new features can be built on top.
I remember getting hung up on tail() in checkuser just to add search method to it.
That code is still broken, actually. It fails to tail if concurrent NFS appends put zeroes into the file :)
I am always trying to write my code cleaner, and I already use more comments. Readability is important, and I'm sure Brion can attest to that.
So, are we talking about clean code, more comments, or the problem with more information about links in links table?