As mentioned in the TechCom radar email last week, there will be a public IRC
discussion on the future of rev_parent_id on Wednesday, 2018-06-06 in the
#wikimedia-office channel at 2pm PST(22:00 UTC, 23:00 CET).
The RFCs original title was "Use ar_page_id to determine the parent IDs for
undeleted revisions" <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193690>. However, the
discussion has drifted quite a bit, and is now touching on questions around the
size differences shown on the history and contributions pages, which is the only
thing that rev_parent_id is used for. Perhaps we should have filed a separate
ticket, but at this point, that would just have meant splitting the
conversation, and creating more confusion...
Anyway, in preparation of the RFC discussion, here are again the main question
that need answering:
* Can we do without rev_parent_id entirely? Can we live without the size info
on Special:Contributions, or can we query it cheaply enough?
* Do we want to record the original "edit as intended", and if yes, where?
* On a side note, what's the best way to detect a page's first revision, and do
we still need that if we have the page creation log (and recentchanges).
I have tried to summarize the discussion so far, with the available options and
considerations, at <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193690#4254713>.
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Platform Engineer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.