On Sat Oct 21 10:27:59 2023 +0000, Jinoh Kang wrote:
Okay, I've read the prior discussions regarding the rationale. Still, I don't think you should change the System UUID for *existing* prefixes. Perhaps we could use the registry to detect whether the prefix is new, and use the new algorithm for new prefixes. We could also record the UUID in the registry "permanently."
Maintaining any way of backward compat on this ID doesn't look feasible. E. g., the current way with a bug reports bios hashtag in serial field on my desktop due to missing fields not being handled. This ID is already non-unique, and maintaining these algorithms backwards would take unreasonable amount of effort (with arguably no gains). Probably more important, /etc/machine-id can be changed anytime by user or system resintall, it is not true hardware id. If anything firmly relies on HW id to persist forever, it is broken already.
Regarding the original discussion, I also don't really understand why we should necessarily obfuscate /etc/machine-id for uuid / serial reporting. App has access to the file anyway, and Wine neither sends the ID anywhere nor tracks the user, it is between the app and the user. On Windows fwiw it will get real motherboard serial and other information like that.