Hallo All!

Regarding the problem of duplicate filenames, is there any standard, or at
least an unspoken agreement, of how to name .PKT files that are bundled
insied arcmail packets? 

I do not have a problem in writing code that assures that *my* system (or
at least the program that I am writing) will always emit unique file names.
The problem is that another system might use another algorithm, and
therefore, it could by accident generate a filename that clashes with one
that I have generated.

Imagine that I am packing an arcmail packet for my downlink and simply use
my system time (mangled a little bit of course because I want to be able to
pack more than one packet per second ) as name for a PKT file
inside the packet. Then imagine that my downlink has another uplink, who
uses a similar scheme to name PKT files. Then, by accident, it could happen
that my downlink (who has ISDN and therefore two channels) receives an
arcmail packet from me and an arcmail packet from the other uplink at the
same time, and while both arcmail packets have different names (his mailer
assures this, it renames an incoming arcmail bundle if the name already
exists in the inbound directory), it might be the case that one of the two
arcmail packets contains a PKT file with a name that is also used in the
other arcmail packet. Especially if system time is used for naming PKT
files, this situation is not too unlikely.

The problem is that if the downlink is using a "not so smart"
tosser, the tosser will unpack *both* arcmail packets before tossing
anything. Depending on the setup of the packer, this might lead to one
packet overwritten by the other one, an effective mail loss. I guess that
substantially more than the half of all fidonet nodes have a setup that
suffers from this potential problem.

I know that this essentially is a bug in the tosser that the downlink uses.
The tosser could be able to circumvent this problem. On the other hand,
most tossers currently being used do not do this. Fastecho is one prominent
example, and I am sure there are others. So I have to find a way to
generate file names that are as unique as possible. I would like to encode
both the AKA of the receiver and the AKA of my system AND my system time
into the packet name. That would surely be unique, but it does not fit into
the 8.3 filenaming convention ...

Are the algorithms known by which commonly used tossers like Fastecho or
Squish name their PKT files, so I can be compatible with them? Do you have
any other practical ideas? Or am I simply worrying too much?

Viele Gruesse,
Tobias.

--- timEd/2 1.10.y2k+