Reducing amount of sections in a course deletes summary content when other resources/activities not added to section yet

Reducing amount of sections in a course deletes content that exists within the Summary if there are no other Activities and Resources in that section. This occurred in 2.9 build. I consider this a bug/regression but some others may not.

I think the section should be considered orphaned if there is text in the Summary, and only text in the Summary. That is 'content'.

It's the expected behavior and the consistent behavior that is most important I think. If other resources and activities are not 'deleted' then I would expect any other content that resides in that section to also not be deleted. I understand the chances of having just content in a Summary and changing the number of sections at the same time might be slim but not unheard of. I know of teachers in our university that use just Summaries with images, links, etc.

To recreate:

In 2.8

• create some text, links, embedded video, images, etc. within a Summary in a Section that resides at the bottom of your site
• make sure there are no other Resources or Activities added yet
• reduce the number of sections so that the section you just created a summary for is no longer visible
• add to the number of sections so that the section you just created a summary for is visible again
• the content that was created still exists

In 2.9+

• create some text, links, embedded video, images, etc. within a Summary in a Section that resides at the bottom of your site
• make sure there are no other Resources or Activities added yet
• reduce the number of sections so that the section you just created a summary for is no longer visible
• add to the number of sections so that the section you just created a summary for is visible again
• the content that was created is gone and restoring the number of sections cannot bring back the summary

Mike Churchward was able to pinpoint where this happened https://github.com/moodle/moodle/commit/bb01883867f3c85ebaa094615ddfadb8c5f1f518

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-10405

More discussion around this: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=195836#p1341561