Base-36 bug IDs

Switch to base-36 bug IDs. Instead of 123456, we’d have 2n9c. Instead of 12 345 678, we’d have 7clzi. Had base-36 been used from the beginning, the ID of the most recent bug as of this writing, 245939, would be 59rn and it wouldn’t be until the 1 679 616th bug that the base-36 representations reach five “digits”.

Handling currently existing bugs is quite simple:

• basically no changes to schema

• convert the IDs in database to current_id.to_s.to_i(36): the base-10 database ID of the current bug #12345 changes to 1776965, which will be represented as the base-36 number 12345 in URLs.

• make the web app convert the ID between base-36 (URL representation) and normal integers (database queries).

Current URLs would stay the same and new bug IDs would be allocated beginning from ‘a’. Perhaps a bit of database magic here to allocate free IDs between the used ones.