From: Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org>
To: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] Add 'compose' command
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	<CAMP44s1117VXAOnURjFAeva93oiJsKKPji4awN_SoNFo0QvPPw@mail.gmail.com>User-Agent:	Notmuch/0.12+81~g839a805 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.3.1
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Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:34:26 +0300
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Cc: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@ngmail.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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On Wed, 18 Apr 2012, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:34:30 +0300, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Running "notmuch compose" more than once within a second would result in
>>> > identical message ids for the messages, which is not a good idea. That's
>>> > not likely in interactive use, but the notmuch cli is highly scriptable,
>>> > so someone is bound to hit this.
>>> >
>>> > Some paranoid might also be worried about "leaking" the time you run
>>> > "notmuch compose"... which may be different from the actual time you
>>> > send the message.
>>>
>>> It's still better than the current situation; nothing. In any case,
>>> people that have not needed this would not be affected; their UI would
>>> override the Message-ID.
>>>
>>> So do you have a better suggestion for a Message-ID?
>>
>> The easy way would be to just use g_mime_utils_generate_message_id()
>> [1]. It doesn't give you any control of the part before @, but I'm not
>> sure if that really matters.
>
> This is what gmime does:
> g_strdup_printf ("%lu.%lu.%lu@%s", (unsigned long int) time (NULL),
> (unsigned long int) getpid (), count++, fqdn);
>
> Which actually has some of the issues you mentioned.

Thanks for looking into gmime source. The implementation is a bit of a
disappointment.

> I can do the same if you want (add pid and count). The advantage of
> using our own format is that not only would it be more unique, but it
> would not have "@fqdn".

I'm starting to think doing our own would be the best, although I
wouldn't object to using the gmime implementation "for now".

>> Alternatively you can write your own according to e.g. [2]. Glib appears
>> to have decent and portable support for pseudo random number
>> generation. But why bother? I'd go with gmime.
>
> But gmime doesn't have anything random. I would actually prefer to
> have something random though.

Agreed.


BR,
Jani.