[Plone-developers] Re: [Zope-CMF] Re: CMFUid isn't generating real uids

Jean-Marc Orliaguet jmo at ita.chalmers.se
Mon Aug 16 11:01:39 EDT 2004


robert rottermann wrote:

> Hi Gregoire,
>
> I am happy with any form of UID we get.
> However I think the necessary libraries exists to have an UUID 
> generated on both Windows and Linux (do not know about other systems) .
>
> I therefore wonder why we should not use them.
> We will not loose anything, but gain the ability to use the same code 
> as base to create relations and such.
>

Robert, when something is unique there is no such concept as being "more 
unique" - either it is unique or it is not. What CMFUid guarantees is 
that the IDs that it generates are unique within a same CMF site as long 
as all applications that generate UIDs do it through CMFUid. The goal is 
to remove the ID-checking logic from the application and move it to a 
central tool that takes care of it instead. Using a more complex ID 
generator won't make IDs more unique than they are, it will simply make 
them longer and more difficult to read.

So if you want universally unique IDs you need to write a tool that 
enforces a policy on the scale of your "universal" scope, be it within a 
same server, a same domain, a same university, a same country, a same 
continent etc. You will probably need to set up a central ID repository, 
connect servers together and define rules and policies that every 
connected server will have to follow, and that is far beyond the scope 
of CMFUid.

Regards /JM


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