On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 01:28:18PM -0400, James K. Lowden wrote: > > - We still need suggstions for better terminology than "quota classes" > > and "quota types". > > Our last words on that subject were on 20 October:
right... > > > Two pairs that strike me as more mnemonic: > > > > > > id, target > > > principal, securable > > > > There's already an id column in the table. The "class" is the type of > > id, not the id itself. And similarly, the "type" is the type of > > target, not the target itself. > > > > Maybe "idtype" and "targettype"? > > If I understand the problem correctly, some of the naming difficulty > arises from a normalization error. Thinking in relational terms, > id_type is a property of id, and target_type a property of the target. > Those are both independent of the id-target pair, so you really have > three relations, not one, i.e.: > > id, type > target, type > id, target > > I don't know if it's feasible or desirable to separate them that way, > but it would make naming them easier. No - if the IDs were oids this would be true (e.g. "oid 123456 is a user") but they aren't. If the id is 6, the id type field is there to tell you whether it's uid 6 or gid 6. That can't be normalized out; you might well have quota info for both uid 6 and gid 6. The same is true for the target; the limit value is "300" and the target type says whether this is supposed to be 300 blocks or 300 files or 300 wombats. It's not a property of the value "300". the pair (id, idtype) is really the whole key. It's not that the type of the ID is metadata about the ID number > Restricting the discussion to the names in the existing structure, if > "idtype" classifies the existing id column, then that's a good name. > I'd use "id_type", sacrificing brevity for clarity, unless there are > other names with unseparated words. I'm starting to think that "idtype" is in fact best for this. And I think it should be one word, at least in identifiers (perhaps not in text, where it should be "quota ID type") because that way symbols like QUOTA_IDTYPE_USER, which is most of the usages that are going to appear, are delimited neatly. > That's the easy one. The other one means "kind of thing to which the > quota applies". I can't think of an English word that means > "limited thing", but we really want such a word so that the name can be > "limited_thing_type". > > target_type is defensible; that gives us "type of thing thing the quota > is aimed at". But it's still a bit generic, and it's hard to reason a > priori about the "target" of a quota: is a quota aimed at the account > or the storage? > > Unless someone suggests a good word for "limited thing", maybe the best > option is to invent a term of art and *define* it to mean what you > want, after the manner of Humpty Dumpty. To that end I suggest > "quotar" or "quoton". They're both short, easy to remember, and mean > nothing obvious. The latter kinda sorta sounds like "quota on", which > might be helpful. Or "quotee" or "quotand"; the problem is that none of these are particularly clear. Maybe it should be "restype" for resource type. -- David A. Holland [email protected]
