Hey mark!

Feb 16 16:31 05, mark lewis wrote to Jame Clay:

 ml> that is and has been a problem in fidonet for a long time... mainly 
 ml> due to lazy coders and hobbiests doing the designing and implementing 
 ml> and not having enough or any forethough to the future...

That was more or less my best guess except that even in the
"present" (past from today's perspective) it shouldn't have been
a problem even if the "future" (errrr .. today?) wasn't
considered.  Even for that time there was far more going on then they were
accounting for.  I don't think it is a big deal though but others seem to
think so for whatever reason(s).

 ml> many tossers 
 ml> are limited by slightly less than 64k message size because they pull 
 ml> the entire message into memory and work with it there rather than 
 ml> spooling excess stuff to temp disk storage to get to the end of the 
 ml> message and the needed tossing data stored there...

I don't think that is a real problem to compensate for, and might actually
be a good thing .  If pkt sizes (number of messages)
aren't a limitation then it makes it a tad easier to come up with a
meaningful MSGID but I still think a larger number of characters would make
all the difference as far as processing time goes.  As far as any machine
here is concerned seconds are static over more then just a few messages,
especially with a byte limitation as to their size, so having at least a
couple extra bytes to play with and keeping a meaningful hex date/time
stamp isn't such a bad idea methinks.  Personally I prefer a year,
day_of_the_year,hour,min,sec base hex field that can be incremented by
message number and a 10 character field happensto work out quite nicely. 
It could go the distance.  8 characters is also doable but then increases
the amount of steps to keep any meaningful date/time information as well as
increases the limitation as far as how many years one can keep it unique. 
I don't know why the three year limit especially with no rhyme or reason
behind how we all should be generating it.

 ml> that's an old DOS-think limitation...

Only DOS-think for those who believed we all should be limited by
DOS-think.  I think it can be overcome and perhaps even be exploited to all
of our advantage.  Chances are that anyone using software that old wouldn't
even notice any alterations at all.  They probably couldn't take advantage
of any change but it probably wouldn't hurt them either.  On the other hand
doing nothing might hurt everybody, including them, whoever them are.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.2