[Bug 26838] define some token or tuple that unambiguously maps to one message

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26838

--- Comment #2 from Will Thompson <will.thompson at collabora.co.uk> 2010-07-14 12:35:40 PDT ---
We already have at least 3 different message identifiers, depending on how you
count:

• PendingMessageID;
• message-token;
• protocol-token (which has literally never been implemented anywhere at all);
• stored-message-token (on StoredMessages);
• I'm sure I thought of a fifth one last time I enumerated them.

Please can we not add yet another one? As far as I can tell, local-token
doesn't actually give us any more useful information. The logger still has to
use a heuristic to de-duplicate MUC scrollback, because Gabble can't give those
messages the same UUID. The logger doesn't have to de-duplicate rescued
messages, because it can just ignore those.

The only thing that seems worth doing is providing whatever token the protocol
*does* use so that the logger can use it as input for its heuristic. So I
propose:

• Delete protocol-token from the spec;
• Respecify message-token to be whatever the protocol uses as an identifier, if
any, which may or may not be globally unique;
• Revert Gabble to what it did before, using the id='' attribute for
message-token;
• Put big flashing warnings on message-token to say there are no guarantees of
uniqueness, it's literally for information only, it MAY be different if the
message is different but it also MAY NOT, but if the token *is* different then
the message *is* different (which is better than nothing);
• Tell people who try to implement stateless deduplication algorithms that it's
impossible — because, FACT, it is impossible to globally identify messages on
IM statelessly — and to use their logger (or preferably just use tpl and
implement deduplication once there).

We can fix up StoredMessages to only use this token. And then we're down to two
identifiers for a message, and the difference between them is reasonably easy
to describe, and we don't claim to be providing something we can't provide.

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