Re: [Planner Dev] Anticipating future schema changes ?.

[Richard Hult <richard imendio com>]

fre 2004-03-05 klockan 11.31 skrev lincoln phipps openmutual net:
> Is this a good idea ?.
> 
> Changing the DTD and SQL inserts for every new feature
> as it is patched in is sort of a hassle. Be nice to define the
> DTD at least (with CDATA IMPLIED) for all the forseable future
> features even if there is no code or dialogs created yet for
> them. That way we do one big schema /SQL change and then people
> can use the feature as it appear in code without having to
> migrate databases or update DTD. People could thus be a little
> bit forward compatible; not perfect but better than crashing
> out and never opening up the new version file at all.

The problem with doing this too liberally is that we might end up with
lots of unused entries and possibly even entries that end up defined
incorrectly so that we need to add another one with a slightly different
name, but correct. I think it's pretty OK to just add things as we
actually need them, up to 1.0.

> This level of work implies already that you would have done
> some preliminary requirements or specification work on

Even if you know what you want in the future, you can't plan ahead on
the level of detail that might be required to get the data types right,
at least in my experience...

The examples you mention sound good, but I think we shouldn't add them
before they are actually implemented. As an example what could get wrong
is the "Dont export to PDA" flag, that might be better to do with a
custom property that an export plugin provides. Or perhaps not, it's a
bit difficult to know before we actually design and write those parts.

Just in my humble opinion of course :)
Richard

-- 
Richard Hult                    richard imendio com
Imendio                         http://www.imendio.com