On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 10:54:14AM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> Thanks Ted.
>
> Does that mean that the fact uuid-runtime is _not_ installed by default on
> new Debian systems is deliberate (the second part of the BR)?
Thanks, I didn't notice the second part of the bug report. Hmm. That
can go either way; there are arguments in both directions. The uuidd
daemon as designed is not strictly required; it's just that if you are
going to be generating time-based UUID's at a high rate (which a
certain commercial Enterprise Resource Planning system does when
installing its database) without the uuidd daemon, it is possible to
end up with duplicate UUID's.
The flip side of it is, first of all, time-based UUID's are not the
default; random UUID's are (said commercial ERP uses time-based UUID's
because if you fold, spindle, and mutilate in a certain way such that
the Ethernet MAC address is in the most significant bytes, key
compression means they get stored in the database more efficiently;
and BTW, random UUID's are the default precisely because time-based
UUID's leak the MAC address, which could potentially be a privacy
consideration if they are used e.g. in an Open Office document to
track the original author of a document). Secondly, the collisions
took place when said ERP was generating hundreds of time-based UUID's
per second --- and I know of *no* other application that needs to
generate UUID's of any sort, time-based or otherwise, at those rates.
Finally, while Ubuntu may obtain certification for said ERP in the
near future, it is not at all clear they would support Debian, or that
Debian would be interested in achieving certification for this
commercial/proprietary ERP.
The other potential reason why we might want to install uuid-runtime
by default is that I moved uuidgen into that package. It makes sense,
as it *is* a runtime program, and bundling it with either libuuid or
e2fsprogs probably was less intuitive --- but over the years, some
people have gotten used to the fact that uuidgen was always present.
So it has been a bit of a surprise for some folks that uuidgen isn't
present any more, and it hasn't been obvious to some folk where to
find it.
The bottom line is that I don't have strong feelings one way or the
other about whether uuid-runtime should or shouldn't be a default
installed package. It *is* designed such that it is not mandatory,
since I do have an allergy towards more and more mandatory daemons
running on modern Linux systems, but there are certainly benefits to
having it be installed. What do you think?
- Ted
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