How to handle manufacturers that are also suppliers at the same time?

[d-buchmann]

If a manufacturer of a component also sells it (and is therefore a supplier as well), you have two places to maintain your data which will inevitably lead to inconsistencies.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Adafruit
• Analog Devices
• kabeltronik
• Microchip (microchipdirect.com)
• Monolithic Power Systems
• RS Components (if their brand "RS Pro" is mistaken for the suppliers' name)
• Texas Instruments
• Wurth Elektronik

As the manufacturer class is basically a subset of the supplier class as far as I can tell, they could be unified/generalized and have a property added to identify them as manufacturer, supplier, or both. One could even integrate the "Info provider trait" into this system, because there are obviously info providers that are also suppliers.