Re: Should Emacs provide a uuid function?

[Ben Key <bkey76@gmail.com>]

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Hello,

When responding to a question about the availability of the uuidgen tool on
Windows Eli Zaretskii provided links to the Windows SDK uuidgen tool and the
Microsoft Exchange Server GUID Generator tool.  The problem is that we
cannot depend on either of these tools.

To begin with, according to the Man page of the GNU/Linux uuidgen tool, the
generated UUID is written "to the standard output."  The Windows SDK uuidgen
tool does not write to standard output; it instead creates a template IDL
file.  The Microsoft Exchange Server GUID Generator is a GUI application
that allows GUIDs to be generated in any of several formats and copied to
the clipboard.  Neither of these programs write output to stdout or support
the -r and -t command line arguments supported by the GNU/Linux uuidgen
tool, therefore they cannot be used as direct replacements of the GNU/Linux
uuidgen tool.

Even if they were functionally identical to the GNU/Linux uuidgen tool we
should not depend on them because both the Windows SDK uuidgen tool and the
Microsoft Exchange Server GUID Generator are developer tools that will not
be installed by default.

Thus the proposal to simply use the following line of code cannot be
expected to work on Windows unless the binary distribution of Emacs for
Windows provides its own implementation of uuidgen.
  (shell-command-to-string "uuidgen")

I have no opinion on whether or not Emacs should provide a uuid function but
I feel strongly that we should not be advising our users to depend on an
external tool that is generally not available on Microsoft Windows.

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