[Python-Dev] UUID module (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Mon Jun 12 03:55:04 CEST 2006

At 07:24 PM 6/11/2006 -0500, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:

Thomas Heller wrote: > I don't know if this is the uuidgen you're talking about, but > on linux there is libuuid:

Thanks! Okay, that's in there now. Have a look at http://zesty.ca/python/uuid.py . Phillip J. Eby wrote: > By the way, I'd love to see a uuid.uuid() constructor that simply calls the > platform-specific default UUID constructor (CoCreateGuid or uuidgen(2)), I've added code to make uuid1() use uuidgeneratetime() if available and uuid4() use uuidgeneraterandom() if available. These functions are provided on Mac OS X (in libc) and on Linux (in libuuid). Does that work for you?

Sure - but actually my main point was to have a uuid() call you could use to just get whatever the platform's preferred form of GUID is, without having to pick what type you want.

The idea being that there should be some call you can make that will always give you something reasonably unique, without being overspecified as to the type of uuid. That way, people can be told to use uuid.uuid() to get unique IDs for use in their programs, without having to get into what types of UUIDs do what.

Perhaps that isn't feasible, or is a bad idea for some other reason, but my main point was to have a call that means "get me a good unique ID". :)

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