David Fetter <da...@fetter.org> writes: > On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 11:30:15AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: >> 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.
> We don't need to do the not-terribly-portable stuff in the first > round. For that, there could still be a bundled extension. > The point is that UUIDs are nowhere near as usable as users have the > right to expect, and we should fix that. The reason that UUIDs aren't as usable as users "have a right to expect" is that the underlying technology doesn't meet their (your) expectations. Just because it's easy to imagine that there are universally unique identifiers doesn't mean that there actually *are* universally unique identifiers. There are only approximations with varying failure modes. This is not our fault, and I don't want us to get caught up in trying to fix a fundamentally broken concept --- which is what a generic "uuidserial" API would be. If you try to paper over the difficulties here, they'll just bite you on the rear someday. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers