Re: UUID design discussion

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-04-25 14:53:39

Rob Boehne wrote:
> * At the moment wide strings are processed by the name generators
>   by converting every wchar_t to 32 bit, then hashing the bytes, zeroes
>   and all. This doesn't strike me as correct. I think that the string should
>   be converted to UTF-8 on the fly (with 32 bit wchar_t assumed UTF-16
>   and 32 bit wchar_t assumed UTF-32.)
> 
> 
> 
> To my thinking – a string should just be treated as binary data and it should
> not have its encoding changed – this should also make less work.

This behavior makes name UUIDs produced by e.g. "www.example.org"
and L"www.example.org" different, which is unlikely to be what one wants
in practice, and is against the recommendation of RFC 4122, which says

   o  Convert the name to a canonical sequence of octets (as defined by
      the standards or conventions of its name space); put the name
      space ID in network byte order.

I don't think anyone can justify the choice of e.g. 0x41 0x00 0x00 0x00 as
the "canonical sequence of octets" for U"A".