[ZODB-Dev] ZODB4 project plan

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:08 PM 12/2/02 -0500, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> >>>>> "PN" == Pieter Nagel <pieter@nagel.co.za> writes:
>
>   PN> I've allways disliked versions because they conjured up mental
>   PN> images of spaghetti code in the DB engine to cope with the
>   PN> combination of versions and transactions.
>
>I'm not sure why they configured up images of speghetti code.  The
>notion of locking an object seems fairly natural for a database.

Yeah, but that's far from all that versions do.  Most databases don't deal 
with locks beyond a single transaction duration; ZODB versions are much 
more like a revision control system branch, and *that* is what conjures the 
images of spaghetti, or at least complexity.  Revision control, like 
transactions, are something that's hard to do correctly.  In principle the 
algorithms are simple, but in practice there are always nasty little 
details that have to be handled just right.