Re: uuid type for postgres

On Sep 6, 2005, at 2:16 PM, nathan wagner wrote:

> 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.

It's not that hard to get a MAC address or serial number out of a
Mac, the problem is I'm not going to bother writing that code for a
GPL extension to PostgreSQL. There's a better way, anyhow. Darwin
ships with UUID parse/generate/etc functions in its Libc (<uuid/
uuid.h>).

FWIW, that code (the Theodore Ts'o UUID implementation) looks to be
suitably licensed for PostgreSQL, and it actually it appears that
someone has already written a PostgreSQL UUID type using this it...
which is unfortunately LGPL'ed (why?!).

-bob