Re: macaddr data type issue

* Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> [010821 14:10]:
> Justin Clift <justin(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> > What you're attempting to insert is being interpreted as the NULL value
>
> Actually, it's not NULL. The curious behavior comes from a test in the
> macaddr_out routine that causes it to produce an empty-string display if
> the MAC address is all zeroes:
>
> if ((hibits(addr) > 0) || (lobits(addr) > 0))
> {
> sprintf(result, "%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x",
> addr->a, addr->b, addr->c, addr->d, addr->e, addr->f);
> }
> else
> {
> result[0] = '\0'; /* special case for missing address */
> }
>
> This seems a tad bizarre to me, if not an outright bug. The right,
> SQL-approved way to represent "missing data" is as a NULL; there's no
> rationale I can see for treating an all-zeroes address like this.
>
> There's also a special case in macaddr_in that accepts an empty input
> string as meaning an all-zeroes address. This seems bogus as well.
>
> I'm inclined to rip out both special cases, so that an all-zeroes MAC
> address is handled exactly like any other address. Comments?
My gut feeling is that Tom is correct, and there should be no special
cases here.

LER
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Larry Rosenman http://www.lerctr.org/~ler
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