Re: Any reason not to generate my own custom ID value (NOT CUSTOM_ID)?

[Samuel Wales]

this or something similar has definitely been discussed on this
mailing list.  so you are not alone.

although i undersatnd the whole thing as readable id's.  dunno if that
is the prupose.

maybe something like a timestamp and then the usual id would give you
pretty good uniqueness.


On 9/10/20, TRS-80 <trs-80@isnotmyreal.name> wrote:
> First, I want to express my sincere and heart-felt gratitude to Carsten
> (and other contributors) for making and sharing this wonderful piece of
> software.  I have come to refer to it as "one of the gateway drugs to
> Emacs" (the other being Magit, IMHO).  It was certainly one of (if not
> /the/) main reason(s) why I started using Emacs initially.
>
> I could in fact gush all day, however people are busy, so, on to the
> main issue...  :)
>
> It seems to me that there is nothing really stopping me from inserting
> whatever value I like for value of "ID" Property.  Based on brief
> experimentation, org-store-link and org-insert-link seem to happily
> accept whatever value is already there (which I entered manually, for
> testing purposes).
>
> However I seem to recall reading some warning somewhere about this,
> although I cannot seem to find it right now.
>
> What I would like to do, is generate my own ID values in a more human
> readable format, something "ISO-like" for example "2020-09-10-1433" (as
> opposed to the default "uuid" method).  These sort of ID are still
> "Unique" (well, within my own system, anyway) as long as I am not
> generating them more often than once per minute[0].  And they have the
> advantages of being shorter, human readable, and meaningful.
>
> Even when org-id-link-to-org-use-id and org-id-track-globally are both
> set to "t", org-id seems happy to insert my "ISO-like" ID right into the
> hash table and org-id-locations-file.
>
> I do need the "across files" functionality.  My understanding is that
> this is main difference between ID and CUSTOM_ID (the latter being local
> only to the file).  Unless I am misunderstanding?
>
> So, what am I missing here?  Any reason(s) /not/ to use my own custom ID
> value?
>
> In addition to the general case, one particular area I am unsure about
> (as I have yet to get it working) is how this all works out with HTML
> export, as that is something I also wanted to get working at some point.
>
> I tried studying some of the related sources (as well as mailing list
> archive), but could not seem to reach a conclusive answer.  I was hoping
> that some more knowledgeable people could confirm
> whether this is a really bad idea, or not.  Any feedback would be
> greatly appreciated!
>
> Cheers!
>
> TRS-80
>
> [0] It could easily be extended to second (or further) resolution, if
> needed.  For me, minute resolution will be fine.
>
>


-- 
The Kafka Pandemic

Please learn what misopathy is.
https://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-some-diseases-are-wronged.html