Newsgroups: tor.news Path: utzoo!telly!evan From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) Subject: Long message IDs (was Re: attcan't?) Message-ID: <1989May9.001716.23563@telly.on.ca> Reply-To: evan@telly.UUCP (Evan Leibovitch) Organization: The Open Vapourware Foundation (join now!) References: <1989May6.220422.126@telly.on.ca> <1989May7.041643.29194@utzoo.uucp> <1389@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> <1989May8.071129.19925@utstat.uucp> Date: Tue, 9 May 89 00:17:16 GMT One need only look at the references line above to see how quicly this gets unwieldy. In reply to Brian Onn, geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes: >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. >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. >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). A visible sense of sequence would be nice. How about something in the middle - a 9-digit representation of seconds, similar to the way it's used in the Cnews history file, together with the process ID? This way, an article could be: <610566286.20194@foo.bar> From 21 characters down to 15 and possibly less. A possible compromise? (I don't think there's much Cnews can do about long message IDs resulting from domain names as long as :-). -- Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504 Scientists have proven conclusively: Research causes cancer in lab animals