The legacy data carried space-stripped twins: 'DellInc.' beside 'Dell Inc.',
'Windows10' beside 'Windows 10', 'OptiPlex7080' beside 'OptiPlex 7080'. They
rode into the shipped seed catalog, so every site that ran `seed catalog`
inherited them, and they stay invisible until somebody opens a vendor picker
and finds the same company listed twice.
Not a code fault. The collector strips only leading and trailing whitespace,
matches with ilike, and treats the OS list as lookup-only, so it can neither
have created these nor be creating more. They arrived with the classic-ASP
import, which holds the same three pairs today.
`flask catalog dedupe` merges only whitespace-and-punctuation twins, because
those are one name typed two ways. 'Dell' and 'Dell Inc.' normalise apart and
are left alone: that is a naming choice and only a person can make it. The
surviving row is the most referenced, tie-broken toward the spaced spelling,
which is the one somebody pressed the space bar for.
`flask catalog merge` makes that judgment call explicitly, and refuses to
invent a target that does not exist, so a typo cannot move rows into a new
vendor. `flask catalog rename` handles the case neither can reach: a stripped
name with NO twin, where there is nothing to merge into.
All three report and change nothing unless --apply is passed, and dedupe is
idempotent so it is safe in a deploy script.
References are discovered from the LIVE schema rather than listed in code.
There are 15 foreign keys into these three tables across 7 tables, and
machines.controllervendorid and printerdrivers.modelnumberid are not ones
anybody would enumerate by hand. Every reference is repointed before the row
is deleted, so nothing is orphaned, and a plugin adding a table is covered
without editing this command.
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