The original coding in contrib/uuid-ossp created and destroyed a uuid_t
object (or, in some cases, even two of them) each time it was called.
This is not the intended usage: you're supposed to keep the uuid_t object
around so that the library can cache its state across uses. (Other UUID
libraries seem to keep equivalent state behind-the-scenes in static
variables, but OSSP chose differently.) Aside from being quite inefficient,
creating a new uuid_t loses knowledge of the previously generated UUID,
which in theory could result in duplicate V1-style UUIDs being created
on sufficiently fast machines.
On at least some platforms, creating a new uuid_t also draws some entropy
from /dev/urandom, leaving less for the rest of the system. This seems
sufficiently unpleasant to justify back-patching this change.
c941aed96b