On 6/4/07, Markus Schiltknecht <markus@bluegap.ch> wrote:
There already are. Not in libpq, though. Most (if not all) internal
types have those functions.
Well, I don't think it would be puzzling that someone will ask for them even if those functions already exist in PostgreSQL because, as you stated, it's not in libpq. People will actually have to dig in the source to pinpoint where in the source tree those functions exist and how to include them in the program, which, I assume, is less ideal than when it's already included in libpq in the first place. There was a post before on a user who got disappointed because of the "crappy" support of libpq (not PostgreSQL) for binary formats.
In line with this, I'm aware of the issues that this may pose:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/1999-08/msg00374.php this is already very old (8 years ago!). And they discuss about the issue that the representation might change from version to version so it's not done. There have been plans to incorporate CORBA, which IMHO is an overkill, to solve this problem but I don't think it's done yet because it's probably too complex (?). I'd rather recommend them to use ASN.1 (if that's feasible..).
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