Subj : MSGID
To   : Jame Clay
From : Maurice Kinal
Date : Sat Feb 12 2005 11:33 pm

Hey Jame!

The best I can come up with for an 8 digit hex number is to use the the day of 
the year for the first three hex digits, which can be obtained outside the msg 
creation loop, and then get the next five hex digits inside the loop by 
extracting microseconds, which there are a ton of in a 24 hour day.  I tested 
it by adding; "use Time::HiRes qw/gettimeofday/;" to a test MSGID generator.  
It gets set with a line such as, "($seconds, $microseconds) = gettimeofday;" 
and then the MSGID of each message created in a loop using "sprintf("%03x%05x", 
$dayofyear, $microseconds)".  Works great and is definetly unique for at least 
a year, has logic to it, and thus could be easily employable in a database 
(sortable by MSGID).  The only way to successfully dupe the MSGID would be to 
pass a message(s), a year or multiple years later, on the exact same day of the 
year, at exactly the right microsecond.  What are the odds over three years of 
that occuring?  If it were up to me I would add two more hex digits to the left 
hand side of the part of the MSGID after the space, and then add the two digit 
year (0 - 99) and it would be unique for over a hundred years for the low cost 
of two bytes to the total msg length.  A lousy two stinkin' bytes would have 
made all the difference in the world.  Sigh.

Anyhow that is as far as I care to go with this.  I think I went beyond the 
call of duty seeing as it won't matter one lousy bit in the grand scheme of 
things Fido.  But at least I feel it is the best I could come up with for a 
useable MSGID.  It makes far more sense then anything else I've seen thus far.  
So unless you can suggest something better I plan to commit it to the script 
but will probably use the 10 hex digit locally on the XML-RPC server.  That way 
at least local messages shouldn't create dupes that aren't dupes and a faster 
scanning procedure seeing messages will be properly sorted within an archive.  
Right?  "Screw the rest!!!", I say.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.2
 * Origin: Coffin Point - Ladysmith, BC Canada (1:153/401.1)

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