Re: Re: [pear-webmaster] Re: [PEAR-QA] Thought about unmaintained package (Net_IRC in this case)

Sean Coates wrote:

Daniel Convissor wrote:

To save on database columns, etc, I'd suggest putting the word "unmaintained" in the deprecated column and when performing output, have an if statement that displays an appropriate message.

At risk of sounding trollish, mixing data types like this is bad for the database. In this scenario, a column that would normally be DATETIME or INT type now becomes VARCHAR.

Not quite... because the idea is to add two columns: one for the name of the package that supercedes it and the other for the date/time of the depreciation. Since the name of the package would be a tinytext field (I suppose), it wouldn't do any harm to simply put "unmaintained" in there. On the other hand, what you say below is true. In fact, I'd almost suggest linking based on package ID rather than package name (if it depends on user input, it could make a mess if someone enters a package that is not in the DB). I'd suggest a selection box something like for maintainers... but n to 1 selection... But maybe that's overkill. At any rate, even if "unmaintained" in the field signifies unmaintained status, it probably would be best to put that in the interface as a checkbox. Come to think of it, a package may be maintained but depreciated... And another unmaintained but not depreciated. So I guess the best way to solve the problem is to simply add a field indicating whether a package is maintained or not. Klaus

It's akin to putting delimited data in a single column, IMO. An additional column to denote an additional property is the way to go. In a small DB, this won't matter (but is still poor design), in a larger one, it will. S