Jared McIntyre <jmcintyre@dfsoftware.com> wrote in news:loom.20070507T004550-745@post.gmane.org: < snip >
I'd really like to see the MAC address + time generator. I realize that this might be a pain to do in a cross-platform manner, but it would make the library more complete in my eyes, and more likely for me to recommend it to my colleagues. Is there a way that the library could be engineered so that we could provide our own generation implementation?
I agree that it would be very useful to have a time based guid generator. I will continue to look in to this. In the meantime, one could write a function to create guids based on anything they want, eg: boost::guid create() { //generate a guid or values for a guid in the way you want //a platform specific call, MAC address+time generator function //call a boost::guid constructor with either the values //or a string representation of the values boost::guid g(guid_string); return g; }
- What is your evaluation of the documentation?
I don't like it's organization. I'd much rather see it start out with the Rationale section followed by a simple example of the most likely used scenario. I think this is what most users are expecting to see who haven't used the library before and want to get started quickly. You have to weed into the documentation a while before you run into the first generation examples, which is what I think most people will be intereste in. If you need to put the "Class guid synopsis" in the docs, I'd put it near the end since it is more-or-less a dump of the uncommented header file.
I can reorder the docs if that helps people use the library better.
- What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?
A good, cross-platform, UUID library is extremely useful. Without the guaruntee of uniqueness provided by MAC address + time, it isn't as useful for my situation. We have data generated across a large number of disconnected computers (I highly doubt there would see a duplicate, but in my case, we can't take the risk).
This could also be done in a way using the name-based guid create function. See http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/154791 < snip > Andy.