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Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 12:17:13 +0100
To: Gareth Rees <gdr@ravenbrook.com>
From: Richard Brooksby <rb@ravenbrook.com>
Subject: Re: Message IDs
Cc: Perforce Defect Tracking Integration Project staff <p4dti-staff@ravenbrook.com>
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At 2000-10-16 12:00 +0100, Richard Brooksby wrote:

>At 2000-10-16 11:50 +0100, Richard Brooksby wrote:
>
>>Here is some research I've done in the past on the subject of 
>>message IDs, and some further notes.
>
>Somewhere on Tom Van Vleck's page 
><http://www.multicians.org/thvv/tvvswe.html> there is some stuff 
>about good message IDs, I think.  It's all worth reading anyway.

This is a record of a meeting between RB and GDR.

Message IDs will look like

   P-NX

where P is the project, N is the ID number, and X is the check digit, 
calculated with least significant digit * 1 + next most * 2 + etc. 
mod 11.  (Backwards from the ISBN check digit order.)  Use "X" for 10 
as in ISBNs.  (In the past I've suggested hex IDs with "G" as the 
extra digit.)  IDs should be base insensitive.  Start numbering at 
1000 so that our IDs will sort and be the same width, except in the 
unlikely event that we have more than 8999 of them.

For example:

   P4DTI-9872-X

In future, we'll have something like this on our web site:

   http://www.ravenbrook.com/help?message-id=P4DTI-9872-X

And similar stuff.

These message IDs should appear in log output, but also in mail 
messages sent to the administrator, dialog boxes displayed by the 
software (of which there are none), and so on.