Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Cnews and long message-ids
Message-ID: <614318400.11519@telly.on.ca>
Date: 20 Jun 89 06:40:40 GMT
Organization: Telly Online, Brampton, Ontario
Lines: 34

Sometime back I recall a minor debate going on concerning the
length of message IDs. As I recall, there was some resistance to the
Cnews practice of scrapping an on-disk 'sequence number' for message
IDs, instead building ones from an entire readable date, such as

<1989Jun20.043129.10202@telly.on.ca>

I suggested, as a compromise between this and truly unreadable
compressions, going to an ID such as

<614318400.11247@telly.on.ca>

This is essentially, the internal Unix date in seconds since 01/01/70,
and the process ID. It's also 7 characters shorter than the default
Cnews action and still quite unlikely to be duplicated.

If it's worth it to you, the fix is a trivial one, using tools supplied
with Cnews.  The actual file to be changed is $NEWSBIN/inject/anne.jones.
I achieved the Unix internal format within this shell script with

d=`date`
gdat=`$NEWSBIN/getdate "$d"`

Assuming the above variables have been assigned and gdat is
exported, the last line of anne.jones can be changed to:

defmsgid="`echo \<$gdat.$$@$host\>`" -

Well, it's worked for me. So far. That's all I promise.
-- 

Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
   evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
    Computer salesman's credo:  There's an end-user born every minute