opaque ids vs. natural keys

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 3:43 AM, Ian Booth <ian.booth at canonical.com> wrote:
>>
>> My understanding of the sprint in Oakland is that we'd not tackle
>> nesting at this point, which means in theory we'd just need a simple
>> attribute saying "contained": "lxc" for the unit itself. This seems a
>> few order of magnitudes simpler than changing primary keys like that,
>> but I may be missing what this is all about.
>>
>
> Just as a heads up - we are not doing nesting now. We are ensuring the design
> changes made now to support containers will also support nesting later on when
> we do need to provide that feature.

That's exactly what I was covering. I believe no design changes are
at that level are necessary to support containers. A "container": "lxc"
field in a unit is a trivial addition, and not a design change. It took
quite a bit of debate to reach the conclusion that we don't need to
care about nesting right now, and I wouldn't. This is not buying us
anything from the list of critical features we have to add, or the list
of critical things people want from us.

I'm CCing Mark as I know he had strong opinions on that area, and was
the proponent of nesting in the first place.


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net