Re: [PATCH v1 1/1] sysctl: introduce uuid_le and uuid_be

[Theodore Ts'o]

I'm also curious what !@#!? idiot came up with the concept of Little
Endian UUID's.  UUID's, and how to transform them from a printed
representation to a binary presentation, were well defined in a very
specific way in RFC-4122, which came from HP's Apollo/Domain OS, and
was adopted by the OSF/DCE, as well as later by Microsoft.  In all
cases, there was never any such thing as little endian versus big
endian UUID's.  Might as well talk about big-endian and little endian
IP addresses.  This way lies madness.

It's also the case that if all you need is a random UUID's, that
*technically* the endianness matters, but in actual practice, it
really won't matter.

					- Ted

P.S.  Let me guess, it was some clueless Intel engineer when they were
drafting the EFI spec?  Sigh....