Re: macaddr 64 bit (EUI-64) datatype support

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Vitaly Burovoy <vitaly(dot)burovoy(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>>> P.S.: I still think it is a good idea to change storage format,

>> I'm not sure which part of "no" you didn't understand, but we're
>> not breaking on-disk compatibility of existing macaddr columns.
>> Breaking the on-the-wire binary I/O representation seems like a
>> nonstarter as well.

> I think the suggestion was to rename macaddr to macaddr6 or similar,
> keeping the existing behavior and the current OID. So existing columns
> would continue to work fine and maintain on-disk compatibility, but any
> newly created columns would become the 8-byte variant.

... and would have different I/O behavior from before, possibly breaking
applications that expect "macaddr" to mean what it used to. I'm still
dubious that that's a good idea.

The larger picture here is that we got very little thanks when we squeezed
IPv6 into the pre-existing inet datatype; there's a large number of people
who just said "no thanks" and started using the add-on ip4r type instead.
So I'm not sure why we want to complicate our lives in order to make
macaddr follow the same path.

regards, tom lane