Re: [Exim] What to do about non-monitonic process ids

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 06:26:51PM -0500, James P. Roberts wrote:

> I support the following idea, taken from Philip's posted discussion:
>
> >IDEA 3: USE THOSE HYPHENS
> >-------------------------
> >
> >In this scenario we abolish the hyphens in the ID, and make it up to
> >16-characters by extending the time field with another two base-62
> >digits, which can hold milliseconds. This is entirely compatible and
> >doesn't eat into the PID field, but it makes the IDs less readable.
> >You'd have things like this:
> >
> > 18e2IE450006eL00
> >
> >What do people think?
>
> What I think is, the ID's are not human-readable anyway (at least, not
> to THIS human!). Whenever I want to do something with one, I never type
> it by hand, but use whatever "cut & paste" feature is available. Go
> ahead and make maximum use of the 16 characters you have, without
> suffering the "major upheaval" problem.

I agree. The dashes would only seem to provide assistance in
remembering a message-id, which seems highly unlikely. I also don't
think most people are doing base-62 conversions in their head to
figure out the actual values.

I would rather see backwards (and forwards) compatability and future
expandability than having dashes in an otherwise unreadable message
id value.

--Dean