Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: overflow message in RN
Message-ID: <1989Nov20.182418.1683@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <3678@devon.LNS.PA.US> <1989Nov19.065842.2745@alembic.acs.com> <50118@looking.on.ca>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 89 18:24:18 GMT

In article <50118@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>Yeah, I gotta admit I am a bit surprised at this choice in C news.  I
>thought the whole idea was that inews was allowed to be slow and do things
>like get a sequence number.   Putting in the date (which is already on
>the date line) seems a bit wasteful.

It's not a question of wanting the date in the message-id; it's a question
of wanting a decentralized message-id-generation algorithm that doesn't
need exclusive (i.e. with a locking protocol) access to a central file.
Generating based on time and process-id is the obvious approach.  I concede
that the result is rather long message-ids -- there is a mod to shorten
them in our low-priority to-be-examined queue -- but we aren't the only
ones using this approach.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu