On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Shawn Milochik <sh...@milochik.com> wrote: > A discussion broke out in our office today about using these features, > because there are blog posts[1] bashing them and a comment by JKM > saying they should go away[2].
Heh. This is an argument that goes back quite some time. It's even been captured on video (it's a long video, but I swear it's in there somewhere) :-) [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tscMnoS4YU8 > It seems that all of the arguments against are based on the fact that > there were bugs in the past (links in the comments of the blog post > above). However, the "go away" comment is five years old and they're > still there, and the bug tickets have been patched. > > It's easy enough to do what these features do in a more explicit way. > > Considering these facts, I'm wondering what the consensus is in the community: > > A. They're still there because they're too annoying to deprecate > or just not important enough to spend time on. > > B. They're useful shortcuts and their use is preferable to manual > replacements. I know I'm in disagreement with Jacob here, but I'm in camp B. For me, the two most common use cases for a timestamp are a creation timestamp and an update timestamp, so it makes perfect sense that they are baked in as a top-level feature for timestamp model fields. I've used these flags extensively in production, and I'm not aware of any bugs that are actually problems in production. A *long* time ago, there were some issues with serialization, but I fixed those a long time ago because I was using timestamp flags. So - for me, it's not worth removing them. They serve a real-world common use case, they're not fundamentally broken as designed (as far as I am aware), and removing them would require a whole lot of pain in the wider community. Yours, Russ Magee %-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
