uucp seqno wrapping

[utzoo!henry]

A few months ago I described a serious problem in uucp:  its four-digit
sequence number can wrap around in a few days on a busy system, which
leads to all kinds of ungood things for sites which infrequently poll
a busy site.  A possible minimum-effort solution has occurred to me:
anybody have any idea how hard it would be to mung uucp to use a larger
alphabet than just [0-9] for its sequence numbers?  For example, if
the alphabet was [0-9a-z], this would change decvax's current wraparound
time of 3 days to roughly a year:  much more reasonable.  A quick
glance at the code suggests it's not trivial but not hard;  any uucp
hackers care to comment?  I seem to recall at least one site was working
on an improved uucp -- how about incorporating this in your efforts?