Hannu Krosing <hannu@2ndQuadrant.com> writes:
> On 04/24/2014 04:57 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> The reason why there's no generation function in core is that there is no
>> standardized, guaranteed-to-produce-a-universally-unique-value generation
>> algorithm. That was the reason for not putting something in core when the
>> type was first created, and I do not see that the technology has advanced.
> Why can't we implement all 5 variants from
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier
> and just warn about the dangers in documentation ?
Essentially, that would mean carrying around our own implementation
of libuuid --- which includes a bunch of not-terribly-portable stuff,
such as discovering the machine's MAC address(es). That's not really
something I want to see us putting project manpower into.
I wonder what it would take to adapt contrib/uuid-ossp to work on
top of some other popular implementation of that code. We pretty
much bet on the wrong horse when we picked the OSSP library to
depend on, but otherwise I think the principle of using an external
library was good.
regards, tom lane
