Re: Unique OAF Implementation ID's

[Arturo Tena <arturo directmail org>]

Hi!

On Tue, 23 May 2000, ERDI Gergo wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've talked with Michael about OAF UIID's, and I realized that
> 	a, what OAF UIID's are about is not clear, and
> 	b, the current cryptic hex numbers scheme is not nice.
> Point a, is that it's not clear wether the IID needs to be unique for
> applications, or for specific versions (i.e. is it `implementation' as in
> `this is the Helix implementation of Wombat' or is it `implementation' as
> in `this is the 0.6 implementation of Helix Wombat'?). It seems to me the
> former is correct, since I have yet to see a package changing its UIID
> with a new release. If I'm not right on this one, please discard point b,.

"Inside COM" explain (p. 112) that a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) is
necessary when we need to *guarantee* that an interface is unique. This
means that if I know the interface
"OAFIID:0fbc844d-c721-4615-98d0-d67eacf42d80" I will be able to use every
object which implement such interface.

So, IID (Interface Identifier) is unique for interfaces. The interface
*never* change. If you need to modify an interface, then you need to build
another interface (which will have a different IID).

I'm not saying this must be what we need to use, I'm just asking: do we
need to identify globally unique interfaces? I do think so, because I hope
many developers around the world will be creating interfaces.

> 
> Point b, is that if the purpose of the UIID is to identify a
> specific program that implements the given interfaces, why not use
> something human-readable, e.g. the vendor's and the product's name?
> So, my proposal is, something like
> OAFIID:evolution:addressbook-server:helixcode
> instead of the current
> OAFIID:evolution:addressbook-server:0fbc844d-c721-4615-98d0-d67eacf42d80

There's a problem with such identifier scheme: it needs a central
authority which prevents for a company named "FooSystems" in EUA and
"FooSystems" in France England with the same "SuperMailer" program to
choose the same OAFIID.

> 
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	Saludos!
	Greetings!

-- 
Arturo Tena
arturo@directmail.org

If something happens to be foolproof, better fools get invented.
 LotR