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

[Josh Triplett]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:05:52AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> 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.

That seems like a great idea.

- Josh Triplett