Re: [PATCH] Replacement for OSSP-UUID for Linux and BSD

"David E. Wheeler" <david(at)justatheory(dot)com> writes:
> On May 26, 2014, at 9:30 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> How about --with-unix-uuid? Or --with-ext2-uuid?

>> Meh. "Unix" certainly subsumes BSD, so that doesn't seem like a very
>> useful distinction. I guess we could use "ext2" but that would just
>> confuse most people.

> --with-uuid?

I thought about that but figured we'd regret it ...

> So no UUID functions by default, which I guess has been the case all along?

Yup.

> Always seemed weird to me that there was a core configure option specific to a contrib module.

There's other cases, eg --with-libxslt for contrib/xml2. I think
contrib/sepgsql has bespoke configure support too.

Fundamentally the reason uuid-ossp isn't in core is that we feared it
wasn't portable enough, a fear subsequently thoroughly validated.
Perhaps this patch will move us a notch towards having functionality
we could expect to be available everywhere ... though we're certainly
not all the way there yet.

regards, tom lane