On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 02:08:41PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 01:12:38PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > If we are going this way, it would make more sense to provide the
> > release date as the value to sort on. And use a specific date in the
> > future for releases which haven't happened yet.
> That's a really good idea and I think I'll going to implement this.
<snip>
> INSERT INTO releases VALUES ( 'squeeze', '2015-01-01' );
> INSERT INTO releases VALUES ( 'squeeze-security', '2015-01-02' );
> INSERT INTO releases VALUES ( 'squeeze-proposed-updates', '2015-01-03' );
> INSERT INTO releases VALUES ( 'sid', '3000-01-01' );
> INSERT INTO releases VALUES ( 'experimental', '4000-01-01' );
I personally don't particularly like the idea of faking dates to mean
something specific such as "not release yet". On the other hand I like
the idea of storing the release date because it is an information per se
and might be useful as such.
Now, according to that principle, a possible proper way of storing
release dates would be to have the corresponding field NULLABLE and
store NULL for suites not yet released. That way released suite can be
easily sorted by date, taking care of filtering out NULL values before
hand.
That of course leave the problem of how to respectively sort squeeze,
sid, and experimental. I do wonder however if it is really needed to do
that; after all sid can well have a version of a package which is newer
than its version in experimental and vice-versa, the same is potentially
true for testing. Andreas: can you please give an use case where
sorting sid vs experimental is needed?
After that convincing example, I'd vote for an extra column which will
be used to totally order unreleased suite, that would preserve the
ability to filter out non-release suites. (Yes, you can do that also
filtering out future dates, but that sounds incredibly like not the
right thing to do, at least in my eyes.)
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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