[Zope-CMF] Re: cmfuid

[Chris McDonough]

On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 23:44 -0500, Tres Seaver wrote:
> UUIDs have disadvantages:  they can't be used to synthesize *anything* 
> useful to humans (how many of you have ever had to grub through the 
> Windows registry, trying to find the component which is hosing your 
> system?).

This might be obvious but I think the problem with non-opaque ids is
that you *can* synthesize information from is them.  They have business
meaning, which means they need to be changed from time to time
(sometimes for no reason other than aesthetics, e.g. "Mary Wilson got
married and is now Mary Jones, change her username to mjones").  Having
something completely inscrutable as as an identifier introduces its own
set of problems (Windows registry hunting) but removes the natural human
temptation to want to make sense out of an id by itself.

As far as I can tell this is true whether an opaque id is meant to be a
UUID or just a UID, so I don't think it's a failing of UUIDs alone.

Personally, I probably wouldn't want a unique id generator that
generated its id based on, for example, the title of an object.  I've
done this before, but the title changes, at which point the id becomes
misleading, which completely confuses the heck out of me and leads me to
wonder why I didn't use opaque ids in the first place.


- C