"David E. Wheeler" <david@justatheory.com> writes:
> On May 26, 2014, at 9:30 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.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