I have a question in a different direction. What is the meaning of the network
mask in the inet data type anyways? Hosts don't have network masks, only
networks.
If we could store inet in four bytes it would be vastly more efficient both in
disk space usage and in cpu at runtime.
I think it would also clear up the perpetual user confusion between the two
datatypes. I posit that the main source of the confusion is that currently
Postgres lets you use inet for everything, even if what you're really storing
is a network address range which is what the cidr datatype is really for.
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greg