Hello,
from the last IRC devel meetings discussions, one topic was about adding an unique id field per user profiles, with the decision to bring it to mailing lists for broader audience.
That will help to reference easier across records. At this moment, the most relationships are via (username) or (username,domain) when use_domain=1, bringing some complexity.
The main reasons I came up to this were: - in the perspective of gruu implementation for usrloc, with global addresses, an unique (opaque) id seem to simplify things, no matter SIP address of the user changes or not -- the public gruu id can be different than the internal one, though - it will open a new group of K and S modules for merging, S using unique ids mostly everywhere
Moving towards it will be done gradually, keeping backward compatibility for a while. The first steps will be to add new column in few tables (subscriber, location), the username/domain columns will stay there forever in most of the cases, they will become additional info over the time (e.g., primary sip address in subscriber).
From the point of view of filling up the column, can be as simple as setting it to username@domain, or generate some unique string with tools out there.
Overall, there will be a bit more db space used at the benefit of reduced complexity in the code. Jason Penton mentioned that IMS architecture relies also on unique ids.
Looking forward to comments, alternatives, etc ... sr-users community was cc-ed because it is not strictly technical discussion/decision.
Cheers, Daniel