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

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 7:59 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Thanks for all your opinions regarding the addition of new datatype to
support
EUI-64 Mac address, I will work on it and come up with a patch.

Regards,
Hari Babu
Fujitsu Australia