[wp-hackers] Time to change GUID to UUID?

[Eric Mann]

The feature set for 3.2 is already set, but I'd be interested in seeing this
revisited for 3.3 in the next development cycle.

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Lynne Pope <lynne.pope at gmail.com> wrote:

> Last year I sought help for a GUID issue that was causing problems on a
> client site. I've run into problems again, with another site. GUID's are
> supposed to be unchanging, globally unique identifiers. A combination of
> the
> way WordPress GUID's have been written & changed over the years, along with
> myriads of, "how to change your domain name via SQL when moving WordPress"
> posts around the blogosphere, have resulted in GUID's that are far from
> unique.
>
> In this database I'm looking at now, there are hundreds of localhost
> GUID's.
> No way are they globally unique. Worse, the domain has changed so feed
> readers haven't a hope of knowing if these have been delivered previously.
> There are also GUID's that are duplicated and more, due to the blog
> changing
> domains over the years, and the domain part of the GUID being changed
> inadvertently with global SQL updates.
> Then it has the page GUID's that were generated with just the site_url due
> to the auto-draft bug in 3.1.
> There's GUID's shown as example.com/?page_id=123,
> example.com/?post_id=123,
> and   example.com/?p=123 . For some reason, Opera seems to pick up the 123
> and treat these as if they were the same content (they are not).   There's
> even example.com/2004/123 and example.com/2007/123.
> It's a right royal mess but the problem is - their GUID's are not unique,
> even within their own domain.
>
> Once upon a time, people didn't often change domains. Having a domain-based
> GUID wasn't so silly back then. Today, they do change domains and - worse
> still - a lot of inexperienced people run SQL commands to change the URI
> globally when moving their sites.
>
> With 3.2 moving to MySQL5 I can't see any reason why GUID's can't be
> changed
> to UUID.
>
> This ticket has been hanging around for 3 years now and was closed with
> "won't fix" 6 months ago. http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6492
>
> Does anyone know why this isn't being changed? Are there only a very few of
> us that see non-unique GUID's?
>
> Lynne
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