Re: uuid type for postgres

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 03:57:55PM -0400, jonah(dot)harris(at)gmail(dot)com wrote:
> I agree with Josh on the UUID type, it gets abused far too often

Out of curiosity, how does it get abused? It doesn't seem to me
that it would be any more prone to abuse than any other type.

> and (IMHO) isn't widely enough used to belong in the core.

Seems like a self-fulfilling cycle. There isn't one in core
or contrib (pguuid is not in contrib, IIRC), and so one doesn't
get used. Since no one uses one, it's not in core or contrib.

> Couldn't you just fix the
> problem in pguuid rather than write a whole new type?

Not sure which you you're addressing here, but I can't fix the license
problem. Nor can I readily fix the lack of a mac ioctl() to get
the hardware mac address.

In any case, from an economy of effort view, I'd much rather maintain
a postgres extension/interface to an existing uuid library, than fret
the details of writing a uuid library myself. UUIDs themselves don't
really interest me, I just happen to need one for my application.

I'm basically done. I'll tar it up and post a link to an alpha version in a
couple of hours. As far as i can tell, it works fine. I'm calling it alpha
because i'm not doing proper error checking, and i'm not sure how to log or
throw an error even if i detect one. Also, I have only compiled it on
Mac OS 10.3, I'll want to test it on my linux box.

--
Nathan Wagner