Avoid the use of deprecated MariaDB "zero dates" globally. If they're present
as attribute defaults somewhere, they will be replaced with NULL implicitly.
The existing "zero dates" in MariaDB storage will be left intact and this
should not present any issues.
The "timestamp" type in table definitions now corresponds to DATETIME in
MariaDB with "DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP", which
should be close enough to the original behaviour for compatibility purposes.
It is now the recommended type for "modified" attributes, because of the
update trigger on MariaDB. But there is no such trigger implemented on
PostgreSQL as of this moment.
The code used to operate under the assumption that MariaDB doesn't support
quoting identifiers. Not only is that not exactly true, but MariaDB has
reserved keywords that cannot be used as table or column names unquoted.
The parent class for our database objects, Managed_DataObject, has a
dynamically assigned class in staticGet which objects get put into,
leaving us with less code to do the same thing.
We will probably have to move away from the DB_DataObject 'staticGet'
call as it is nowadays deprecated.
like leprous boils in our code. So, I've replaced all of them with //
comments instead. It's a massive, meaningless, and potentially buggy
change -- great one for the middle of a release cycle, eh?