bug#58472: [PATCH] Make `message-unique-id' less prone to collisions

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> So I'm objected to any of these wide-sweeping changes for a reason
> that is so minor it IMO shouldn't have been brought up in the first
> place.  I regret I didn't stop this discussion back then, because it
> has now snowballed into a monster.  But better late than never.

I sort of agree with you here, but not totally -- I think a `make-nonce'
function would be useful in general, because this is an area that's
genuinely difficult to get right, and having a function that does this
for you -- correctly -- is good.

But, like you, I'm not sure about the proposed changes otherwise.

And, like I've said before, there's a reason the Message-ID is on the
format it's on now -- it has information that allows users to do work on
it (so changing it will break some use cases), and it's short (which
makes it efficient in many algos), and it's obviously "good enough" --
it's been this way for decades without any problems.

So I'd prefer not to change `message-make-id', but adding a `make-nonce'
function would be nice anyway.