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I have been in need of a uuid type and ran across the pguuid download
by Xiongjian (Mike) Wang. This wasn't really useful to me for two
reasons: first, it is GPLed and I would prefer a more liberal license,
secondly, it didn't compile cleanly on Mac OS 10.3, due to lack of a
SIOCGETIFHWADDR (? i think, i can get the exact name if you want it)
ioctl() under darwin.
While I could dike out the code that calls it, that seems like a suboptimal
solution. So after a bit of poking around the interweb i ran across
Ralf Engelschall's ossp uuid library. This compiled with minimal
effort on mac os. Some reading, and an evening later, i've made
a server plugin with supporting SQL that implements an 'ossp_uuid'
type.
Now i have four questions:
1: Is it feasible for this to be included in the contrib section of
the regular download? The uuid library is a "notice of copyright" style
license, and I am willing to put my own code into the public domain.
2: Would just calling the type 'uuid' be better than 'ossp_uuid'? It's
certainly a nicer name.
3: Would it be possible to include such a type as a postgres extension
to the usual SQL types. It seems to me that having an officially
supported type would be better than a user contributed type on the grounds
that you could then rely on it being avaiable if postgres was.
In particular, installing it as an extension would require the cooperation
of the DBA, which may be infeasible in some environments.
--
Nathan Wagner
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