More info on UUIDs

[loziniak]

Perhaps UUIDs could have their own page in docs, and be linked from all other pages? They cause some confusion, and info on them is spread in documentation, main info on them being in concept exercises section of config.json docs.

[loziniak]

Hmm I just found more info in configlet docs , but it suggests, that UUIDs can only be generated by configlet. Perhaps we could just add info about using external tools, and link from everywhere to this page? I can do a PR, but I need an opinion on that before starting to work on it.

[ErikSchierboom]

We're fine with any tool generating the UUID, as long as it is a v4 UUID. A document would be nice!

[ee7]

The most complete explanation currently might be at the bottom of building/configlet/lint.md#glossary.

I agree that it'd be nice to explain that it's fine to generate a UUID with external tools. I'd mention at least uuidgen -r somewhere.

On Linux (since 2001) you can also read from /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid:

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid
e681e55b-548c-4b48-b38b-023e612c0173
$ for i in {1..5}; do cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid; done
b4b2837f-9d73-41de-a392-57f26fda908f
a1faa2ac-da2e-4f14-8a54-d69866aa1e87
28dad9b2-5bcf-4309-a5a0-a21328f73cd6
8da622d9-c719-4163-b8f9-37ba508f2bfd
75c64639-1954-4144-90b8-45d16ab0ba2a

$ man proc.5 | grep uuid
/proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid (since Linux 2.4)
    Each read from this read-only file returns a randomly generated 128-bit UUID, as a string in the standard UUID format.

[BethanyG]

Python has a UUID module that is part of the standard library, but our issues in the Python repo also point at both configlet and https://www.uuidgenerator.net/version4 as tools that can be used for generating a UUID v4.