Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 18:06:48 -0400
From: mark@mark.mielke.cc
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: "Jonah H. Harris" <jonah.harris@gmail.com>, josh@agliodbs.com,
	pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, nathan wagner <nw@hydaspes.if.org>
Subject: Re: uuid type for postgres
Message-ID: <20050906220648.GD3069@mark.mielke.cc>
References: <20050906135057.GA24136@granicus.if.org>
	<20050906144930.GA27641@mark.mielke.cc>
	<200509061002.43803.josh@agliodbs.com>
	<36e6829205090612575b954f38@mail.gmail.com>
	<20050906203811.GA3069@mark.mielke.cc>
	<20921.1126043674@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 05:54:34PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I don't see any "big opposition".  People are simply questioning the
> idea whether it belongs in core PG.  The reason we don't want to accept
> everything-and-the-kitchen-sink in core is that we have only limited
> manpower to maintain it.  So you've got to justify that we should spend
> our effort here and not elsewhere.  There's a fair amount of nearly
> ...
> been there awhile.  So one of the questions that's going to be asked is
> how useful/popular it's really going to be.

Sounds reasonable, and certainly no more than I expected. If Nathan
hadn't raised the issue, it probably would have been a few months
before I raised it myself.

> One thing that is raising my own level of concern quite a bit is the
> apparent portability issues.  Code that isn't completely portable is a
> huge maintainability problem; in particular, stuff that requires
> system-dependent behavior used nowhere else in Postgres is a real pain.
> It sounds like the UUID code expects to be able to get at the machine's
> MAC address, which suggests serious issues in (a) relying on
> not-too-standard APIs, (b) possible protection issues (will an
> unprivileged process be able to get at the MAC address?), and (c)
> ill-defined behavior on machines with more or less than one MAC address.
> Not to mention that MAC addresses aren't so unique as all that.

I'll try to prepare an answer for this. (I started to write a lot of
information - but is it unverified from memory, and perhaps should be
more authoritative before presented as truth)

> The bottom line is that we're willing to listen, but it's not by any
> means a slam dunk to get this into the distribution.

Sounds good.

Cheers,
mark

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