Re: Should Emacs provide a uuid function?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Leo writes:
 > On 2011-04-25 04:43 +0800, Chong Yidong wrote:
 > > I'd rather not clutter up Emacs with such odds and ends, unless there's
 > > a demonstrable need; OTOH, anyone who cares can just use uuidgen.  Do
 > > you have any specific application in mind?
 > 
 > Calendar, bbdb, org, message

Leave mail apps out.  uuidgen doesn't produce a syntactically legal
Message-ID by itself (see RFC 5322, Section 3.6.4), and in practice
it's unreasonably long for a component.  It's often convenient to have
a Message-ID of reasonable length that is unique to the host, but not
necessarily universally (until the @domain part is added).

I have to agree with Yidong; there's no good reason not to inline

    (shell-command-to-string "uuidgen")

in any of the applications you've mentioned if you want an
uuidgen-format UUID.