I'll help feed that old-fashioned "foible" since it will hopefully encourage you to jump into the development of Koha at some point. :-)
 
Here is an explanation I sent to another dev:

I'll help feed that old-fashioned "foible" since it will hopefully encourage you to jump into the development of Koha at some point. :-)

<snip>

It should probably still be SOP to check for the existence of tables/columns/etc. prior to adding them. mysqldump does a similar sort of thing by default, proceeding every "CREATE TABLE" with such as this:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `foo`;

We could do something like:

UNLESS (<table> OR <column>) THEN <update-foo>

We could even add a function which could be called to do this to make it even easier to do.

Kind Regards,
Chris