Horton

Re: Support for NSS as a libpq TLS backend

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

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From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123@gmail.com>, Jacob Champion <pchampion@vmware.com>, "pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, "hlinnaka@iki.fi" <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, "andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com" <andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com>, "michael@paquier.xyz" <michael@paquier.xyz>, "thomas.munro@gmail.com" <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, "sfrost@snowman.net" <sfrost@snowman.net>
Date: 2022-02-04T18:33:00Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Fri, Feb 4, 2022 at 1:22 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb  3, 2022 at 02:33:37PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> > As a philosophical matter, I don't think it's great for us - or the
> > Internet in general - to be too dependent on OpenSSL. Software
> > monocultures are not great, and OpenSSL has near-constant security
> > updates and mediocre documentation. Now, maybe anything else we
>
> I don't think it is fair to be criticizing OpenSSL for its mediocre
> documentation when the alternative being considered, NSS, has no public
> documentation.  Can the source-code-defined NSS documentation be
> considered better than the mediocre OpenSSL public documentation?

I mean, I think it's fair to say that my experiences with trying to
use the OpenSSL documentation have been poor. Admittedly it's been a
few years now so maybe it's gotten better, but my experience was what
it was. In one case, the function I needed wasn't documented at all,
and I had to read the C code, which was weirdly-formatted and had no
comments. That wasn't fun, and knowing that NSS could be an even worse
experience doesn't retroactively turn that into a good one.

> For the record, I do like the idea of adding NSS, but I am concerned
> about its long-term maintenance, we you explained.

It sounds like we come down in about the same place here, in the end.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

Commits

  1. Add tab-completion for CREATE FOREIGN TABLE.

  2. Add tap tests for the schema publications.

  3. Move Perl test modules to a better namespace

  4. Adjust configure to insist on Perl version >= 5.8.3.

  5. Simplify code related to compilation of SSL and OpenSSL

  6. Introduce --with-ssl={openssl} as a configure option

  7. Implement support for bulk inserts in postgres_fdw

  8. Fix redundant error messages in client tools

  9. doc: Apply more consistently <productname> markup for OpenSSL

  10. Check ssl_in_use flag when reporting statistics