md5() sorting

Hi,

in GNUmed (wiki.gnumed.de) we use schema hashing to detect
whether a database can safely be upgraded or used by a
client. The general procedure is this:

- generate a line-by-line representation of the database
objects in the format "schema.table.column::data type"
from the information catalog

- sort those lines by their md5() hash (to avoid locale
related sorting issues - or so we thought)

- generate an md5() hash over the concatenation and
compare that to known hashes

This has worked nicely so far. However, recently a Norwegian
user found that his setup sorts those md5() line hashes
differently from other setups. Be his setup broken or not
we'd like to avoid this issue in the future. What
immediately comes to mind is to convert the md5() hex string
to integer and sort by that (numeric sorting should, by all
means, be universally acceptable) but, alas, it's to large
even for bigint.

So, I was thinking to extract parts of the string, convert
those into ints and re-concatenate those ints into a string
and sort by that - sorting digits-only strings should be
pretty safe universally, too. However, I am not entirely
sure whether I'd be running a higher risk of collisions that
way. (Much simplified) example:

md5 = x'fe' (I know an md5 can never really yield that value)

part 1 = x'f' = 15
part 2 = x'e' = 14

string to sort by = '1514'
(while in reality 'fe' = 254 => '254')

I *think* I should be safe but would like to hear another
opinion. --- I just realized this is not an SQL or even
PostgreSQL related question at all so to justify my post:

Should I be going about this sorting or hashing or detection
business in another way entirely which can be done at the
SQL level ?

;-)

Thanks,
Karsten
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