So, what is the conclusion here? The "just use the object_id" camp
seems to have mustered the stronger arguments, but then, I'm
in that camp... Is there sufficient consensus to make an
OpenACS policy on this?
One more argument:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the latest code in Lars's new Bug Tracker
package still has a race condition when creating these pretty
"expose it in the URL" ids in bt_patch.new. That's both
on the head and on the 4.6 branch, both Postgres and Oracle:
select nvl(max(patch_number),0) +1
into v_patch_number
from bt_patches
where project_id = new.project_id;
The code neither locks the
bt_patches table nor does
anything else fancy (like pre-allocating rows in the style of some
room reservation systems), so as far as I can see it's just plain
wrong.
I think we can all agree that Lars is one of our best and most skilled
developers, yes? So if he got it wrong, what does that say about how
likely other developers are to get it wrong?
Therefore, I suggest that if the, "No, we don't want to expose the
object_id in URLs, we want something else" camp really wants
their way, that a necessary (but not necessarily sufficient)
requirement is that is someone first design and implement a general,
scaleable, and correct solution that can be used by any
package to map object_ids to some or one "pretty" id representation.
