Comment by Dylan16807
1 year ago
Are you suggesting we should never have made the random one, and stuck with mac address plus timestamp forever?
1 year ago
Are you suggesting we should never have made the random one, and stuck with mac address plus timestamp forever?
I think object identifiers would be better, althoug they should add another arc that does not require registration, based on: (fixed prefix).(type of identifier).(number of days past epoch).(parts according to type of identifier).(optional extra parts). (I had partially written my proposal, and I would want ITU and/or ISO (preferably ITU) to approve it and then manage it.) For example, type 0 could mean international telephone numbers, type 1 could mean version 4 IP address, type 2 could mean domain names (encoding each part as bijective base 37, from right to left), 3 could mean a combination of geographic coordinates with radio frequencies, 4 could mean telephone numbers with auto-delegated telephone extensions, etc. (I had also considered such things as automatic delegation, clock drift, etc; it is more carefully considered than UUID and some other types of identifiers.)
Sounds like you're in the realm of URNs? I don't know about that description, I think there's a benefit to a short and fixed-size ID. Though maybe for the domain name example you could have an alternate form that hashes any domain that goes over 20-30 characters.
I actually believe we shouldn't have made any of them
Oh okay. That's a pretty different suggestion from the comic.
Would you suggest random 128 bit numbers, then? Otherwise it's hard to see what else would serve the same role without being UUID in a trenchcoat. And having identifiers is important.
Yeah I would really like if UUID was just 128 bits of randomness and nothing else. The whole version thing sucks, and my point (which you are right in that the ordering is a little off) is that UUIDv4 is the only good one and the rest basically should not exist. UUIDv4 itself is ruined by the fact that it needs to have a version embedded in it because the other ones exist.