[Pkg-systemd-maintainers] Bug#619244: /etc/machine-id

[Simon McVittie]

On Sun, 21 Jul 2013 at 13:23:48 +0200, Michael Stapelberg wrote:
>   Programs may use this ID to identify the host with a globally unique
>   ID in the network, which does not change even if the local network
>   configuration changes. Due to this and its greater length, it is a
>   more useful replacement for the gethostid(3) call that POSIX
>   specifies.

I've wondered whether to ask base-files or some similarly core package
to provide /etc/machine-id so that it exists even on non-systemd systems;
it would be easy to populate from something like
"sed s/-// /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid" on Linux, and perhaps
/dev/[u]random on non-Linux. Do you think that's a good idea?
It would have the side-effect of resolving this bug.

    S