Re: Continuing discussion of oaf ...

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com> writes:

>  
> > UUIDs are an easy solution of this problem. (although, as we have
> > discussed it, not the most perfect one)
> 
>         UUID's are a short term hack, that relies on the assumption that
> most people will not want to implement any new interfaces, which is just
> silly. True, currently it is too difficult to do so, but I expect this to
> become easier through a several pronged strategy.

I don't see what implementing new interfaces has to do with it?

>         So I ask you to re-consider, my suggestion has the best of both
> worlds; an easy to type, and _Check_ by eye, naming scheme, with the
> option of adding a huge number to the end if you do not believe you can
> sensibly partition your space. Eg. perhaps gnome-core's applets might want
> to make this the default usage.

I still think including the UUID component is necessary to guarantee
global uniqueness in a fully decentralized way. DNS-style namespace
allocation doesn't really work; it has not worked well for Java. So I
am still against making it optional.

I don't think being easy to type is a requirement; #defines should be
used anyway to avoid typos, the bane of magic string constants. And
the current scheme is actually very easy to check. Two different UUIDs
are very easy to compare by eye because on average half the bits will
be different, meaning nearly every digit will be different. So it's
surprisingly easy to compare for equality by eye.

 - Maciej