pak21 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2017 8:41 pm[ Not sure if this is the right place for this topic. If it's not, please move it somewhere more appropriate ]
Sorry for the late reply! I subscribed to this forum 2 days after you posted this question, and I didn't notice it until now... I will be paying more attention to questions related to my projects from now on!
pak21 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2017 8:41 pmAs well as the well known game IDs, ZXDB contains IDs for things like releases, labels and the like. How stable are these IDs across ZXDB releases? For example, if I'm looking at the release (2259, 4) which is currently the budget re-release of Head over Heels, will this always be the budget re-release of Head over Heels, or could that move to (2259, 3) or (2259, 5)?
The short answer is, these IDs are extremely stable. They will never be changed unless there's a very very good reason to do so.
The long answer is a little more complicated...
In your example, (2259,4) refers to the 4th re-release of InfoseekID number 0002259. Let's see:
ABOUT INFOSEEKID:
In original WoS archive, sometimes people realized that two different numbers were actually different releases of the same program, in these cases Martijn moved all information to one of the entries and eliminated the other. It's probably the reason there are so many gaps in program numbers at WoS.
This may also happen sometimes in ZXDB, but only in cases I'm fairly confident it won't cause trouble for others. In this case, I will mention it here, and I won't reuse a deleted InfoseekID for anything else so there will be no false positives.
A counter-example is program "Enigma" with InfoseekIDs
0009708 and
0009709. One of them should have been deleted but, since original WoS archive still have 2 different entries, I didn't want to break compatibility so I just added a comment about it instead. This way, we won't have lost links, or entries from original WoS archive without correspondence in ZXDB.
ABOUT RELEASE SEQUENCE:
This number is exactly the order that multiple releases were stored in original WoS archive for each program, thus the order they appear in a webpage.
This order was supposed to be chronological, but this information isn't always easy to find out and verify. In practice, I will only modify the sequence numbers of a particular game, if we can be sure that the release order for a certain game is wrong. If it happens, I will also mention it here.
Notice I'm already adding new entries in the proper order, so we won't have this problem in new cases.
pak21 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2017 8:41 pmI've tried to solve this problem multiple times in the past when dealing with changes from WoS database dumps and it's
hard. On the other hand if ZXDB has now hard-forked from WoS, then it's easier...
In practice, you can assume these numbers are fixed. Any changes will be very rare, and I will mention them in this forum.
Can you tell me more about your usage of this information, so I can try to minimize impacts for you?