[development] Solving the dev->staging->live problem

[Adrian Rossouw]

On 11 Aug 2008, at 10:25 PM, Greg Dunlap wrote:
> - Upgrading an existing site would be virtually impossible. Every id  
> would change, plus you would have to update every foreign key  
> reference to every id throughout core AND contrib.
Yes, we'd need foreign key support in schema api, but that is  
something I think we should end up doing anyway. (and no, not in a way  
that slows down the work in db api for 7).

> - For sites not running pathauto, every URL would change.
Sites not running pathauto would have aliases created for the existing  
urls.

> That's just a couple of the purely technical reasons. I would also  
> add that a conscious decision was made to move away from PHP- 
> generated IDs in Drupal 6, and it seems to me very unlikely that  
> this will be reversed. There are several issues around this in the  
> queues. It would offer us up some great functionality but I just  
> don't see it happening.
If it needs to stay in the db, it's possible to use mysql and pgsql  
functions to create a next value. That would of course cut us of from  
sqllite.

I'm not entirely wedded to the idea, and even if it's supported, i  
foresee it being an option and not the default mechanism for doing  
things, for at least a release or two,
but it could help us solve a few very interesting problems down the  
line, apart from just the import export problem.

I do however think we should look at extending D6's import/export  
functionality through contrib, as it will help us pick up issues in  
core that can be helped along with core
api changes, and makes the functionality available to site developers  
sooner rather than later. (ie: let's not boil the ocean)