On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 11:09:50AM -0600, Charles Cazabon wrote:
[snip]
> I'm actually curious why djb specified this as the process start time,
> rather than the current time. I see no obvious advantage to using the
> start time, and as the PID and count are encoded, it would not appear to
> have any affect on the possibility of collisions.
>
> Personally, I would lean to using the current time instead of start
> time, and would not bother with resetting count; it has no harmful
> effects.
>
> Anybody see any problems with that?
With regard to collissions: when updating the timestamp everytime,
chance increases that shortly after the process exits, it's PID is the
next PID assigned since the global PID counter has wrapped around, and
a delivery attempts to happen from the same PID in the same second.
Ofcourse, collissions are not a problem when maildir software conforms
to the rest of the spec.
The other issue is that when you keep the same timestamp for the
complete lifetime of the process, all messages with a different
deliverycount but delivered by the same process can still be grouped
together, should anybody find a need for that.
If you ask me, just update the timestamp everytime if that helps your
sorting. It won't likely cause collissions, and if you get a
collission, make sure you handle it gracefully and compliant.
Greetz, Peter
--
Monopoly http://www.dataloss.nl/monopoly.html
