Newsgroups: tor.news Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!geoff From: geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) Subject: Re: attcan't? Message-ID: <1989May8.071129.19925@utstat.uucp> Summary: why C news generates long message-ids Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto References: <1989May6.220422.126@telly.on.ca> <1989May7.041643.29194@utzoo.uucp> <1389@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> Date: Mon, 8 May 89 07:11:29 GMT In article <1389@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn) writes: >In article <1989May7.041643.29194@utzoo.uucp> > henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >>In article <1989May6.220422.126@telly.on.ca> >> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: > ^^^^^ [ed. note: are these article id's really necessary?? >I mean, why is it necessary to encode the date in the ID?. ... ] C news generates longish Message-IDs because I didn't want to have a sequence-number file, which can get truncated by a crash during updating, and because Message-IDs are currently generated by a shell script. The current date and time combined with the shell's process id (the last number before the "@") should keep Message-IDs unique. Without the date, time or process-id, Message-IDs could collide. However, there are reasons other than aesthetics for preferring short Message-IDs, including limitations in dbm(3) on total key and data lengths per block. Furthermore, RFC 1036 (nee 850) only requires that messages be unique for two years. One could omit high-order digits of the year or encode the information more compactly, perhaps printing integers in radix 64 (e.g. <1989May7.041643.29194@utzoo.uucp> could be expressed as , saving 12 characters). -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu It's all Henry's fault. (TM)