Quite a few people have expressed interest in having UUID functionality in the standard library, and previously on this list some suggested possibly using the uuid.py module i wrote: http://zesty.ca/python/uuid.py This module provides a UUID class, functions for generating version 1, 3, 4, and 5 UUIDs, and can convert UUIDs to and from strings of 32 hex digits and strings of 16 bytes. The thread of messages posted on python-dev begins here: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-March/062119.html My reading of this is that there was a pretty good consensus on the issues with this module that need to be addressed: (a) UUIDs should be immutable (and usable as dict keys). (b) The str() of a UUID should not contain curly braces. (c) The uuid1() function, which generates a version-1 UUID, uses a very slow method of getting the MAC address. (d) The retrieved MAC address should be cached. (e) Tests need to be written. The big question seems to be item (c); all the other items are easy to take care of. Assuming (a), (b), (d), and (e) are done, i see a few options for how to proceed from there: 1. Remove the uuid1() function, then put uuid.py in the standard library so at least we'll have the rest of the UUID functionality in 2.5b1. Fill in uuid1() later. 2. Remove the MAC-address functionality from uuid.py; instead let the caller give the MAC address as an argument to uuid1(). Put that in the standard library for 2.5b1 and fill in the function for retrieving the MAC address later. 3. Add uuid.py to the standard library with its current slow method of finding the MAC address (parsing the output of ifconfig or ipconfig), but cache the output so it's only slow the first time. 4. Figure out how to use ctypes to retrieve the MAC address. This would only work on certain platforms, but we could probably cover the major ones. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that this would be fully hammered out before the code freeze. 5. Don't include any UUID functionality in 2.5b1; put it off until 2.6. What are your thoughts on this? Thanks! -- ?!ng