On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 22:15 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > The biggie is floating-point format. IEEE standard is not quite > universal ... and even for platforms that fully adhere to that standard, > it's not entirely clear that we get the endianness issues correct. > There used to be platforms where FP and integer endianness were > different; is anyone sure that's no longer the case? >
These seem solvable with platform-specific code in the send/recv for the applicable types. I don't have such machines to test on, however. > But I'll agree that cross-version hazards are a much more clear and > present danger. We've already broken binary compatibility at least once > since the current binary-I/O system was instituted (intervals now have > three fields not two) and there are obvious candidates for future > breakage, such as text locale/encoding support. Is there a lower standard for maintaining compatibility for external binary representations than external text representations? It seems that there would have to be more flexibility in changing the external binary representation if a type between versions in order to "be cheap to convert to internal form" as the docs say here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/sql-createtype.html Regards, Jeff Davis -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
