Hi legoktm,
I think this proposal makes sense and should be done. I have one (maybe dumb) qiestion: The mapping of conten model ids and formats sounds like it could be done as an php array in a global var, too. Maybe I don't see any point you considered, but wouldn't it be possible to write this as a global array instead of a new database table, and if yes, why we shouldn't do that?
Thanks for your answer!
It could. But then we run into the same probably we currently have with namespaces. Each extension randomly picks a number it uses for namespaces which end up conflicting.
Setting it as a global would also encourage usage by developers, which we don't want. They should not be aware of what the id is, and shouldn't care either.
This proposal is similar to what we currently do with change tags. Everywhere in code (except for the ChangeTags class) we refer to tags by their string name, but in the database they are stored as integers, and there is a table that maps the integer to the string name.