Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!ncrcan!brian
From: brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn)
Newsgroups: tor.news
Subject: Re: Long message IDs (was Re: attcan't?)
Message-ID: <1394@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM>
Date: 9 May 89 13:29:08 GMT
References: <1989May6.220422.126@telly.on.ca> <1989May7.041643.29194@utzoo.uucp> <1389@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> <1989May8.071129.19925@utstat.uucp> <1989May9.001716.23563@telly.on.ca>
Reply-To: brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn)
Organization: NCR Canada Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario
Lines: 33

In article <big C news ID :-)> evan@telly.UUCP (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>One need only look at the references line above to see how quicly this gets
>unwieldy.

Yes.  The reference line is now three lines long.  I seem to recall that 
rn will blow up at some limit.

>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 like this.  This would satisfy Geoff's requirement for unique IDs without
having to keep a separate message counter file that could get truncated.
It may not be as easily generated from standard unix tools, though.  It is
possible to create the current ID in a shell script from date and expr
contortions.  The new method (if adopted) would require a helper program.

>(I don't think there's much Cnews can do about long message IDs resulting
>from domain names as long as <ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> :-).

Ok.  I'll change it to ncrcan.uucp :-)

Brian.

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