Version model seems unnecessary

[Michael Nelson]

Anthony said:
"Is Version really needed? It would seem that instead of

   Review --> SoftwareItem
     |
     v
   Version

   we might want

   Review --> SoftwareInARepository (+Repository) --> SoftwareRelease
(+version) --> SoftwareItem

   ... where SoftwareRelease is a versioned SoftwareItem, with a
   unique constraint over the softwareitem + version attributes, or
something.
"

Personally, I'm not sure why we don't simply have version as an attribute on the Review model? This would enable us to return all reviews for a given software item, or reviews for specific versions. Possibly even reviews where the version is greater than X (if we use the postgresql debversion package http://packages.debian.org/sid/postgresql-9.0-debversion)

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

Having a version attribute would imply many many copies of each version string stored in the database, one with each review. I think this could work if there isn't a list of available versions we can check, and we just need to believe the user when a vote is submitted about what version they're reviewing, but even then we could create a new SoftwareRelease (per ascii art above) on demand if somebody submits a review for a version we didn't have so far.

[Michael Nelson (michael.nelson)]

Anthony and I chatted about this bug a few days ago and from memory (Anthony can correct me :) ):

1) We'll remove the version Model
2) Currently just store the version string provided by the client on the review
3) Later, if we need more per-version functionality for reviews, we can update to use a postgres debversion column for comparisons and groupings etc.

[Michael Nelson (michael.nelson)]

Based on a comment by mpt on bug 686553 (related to stats, see comment 2), I actually think that we'll eventually need Anthony's original suggestion in the description, so that we can aggregate stats for:

 1) A software item
 2) A software item in a specific distroseries, and
 3) A software item of a specific version.

I don't know whether there should be a relationship between (2) and (3), or just both related to (1). In this case, the version string column (or debversion column) would just be on (3).