Global repository ID stability

[alijdens]

Hi folks!

There are a few discussions [1] [2] indicating that both node_id and databaseId are prone to changing over time.

I want to store historical data and associate it to repositories but I cannot rely on the name because repositories can be renamed, so I wanted to know if I could use either node_id or databaseId (i.e. the REST API id) for this purpose. If any of these values change, that can break the relations I store, so some clarification around their stability and uniqueness over time.

Thanks!

[shawnHartsell]

@alijdens Thanks for submitting this issue! I've forwarded this to the team that owns this endpoint

[ngfreiter]

A repositories id, or databaseId is unique and immutable, and so is the node_id, since that is derived from the databaseId. We did change the structure of node_id in 2021, see this about here. But outside of any announced changes like that, it should not change.

There was a repo extratone/wtf which was renamed in 2022. Then a new repo named extratone/wtf was created, and that repo has a different id. That is why the id seemed to change in this post.

This post seems to just be related to the migration which changed how we serialized node_id, posted about here.