Horton

Re: BUG #14872: libpq requires a home directory

Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>

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From: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: dcwatson@gmail.com, PostgreSQL mailing lists <pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org>
Date: 2017-10-25T22:35:17Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs 
On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 2:40 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Sigh.  We keep breaking that use-case... which is unsurprising because
> nobody tests it.

:(
And really that's quite a common configuration to have a user
dedicated to Postgres that has no actual home folder.

> According to previous go-rounds, eg commits 5b4067798 and bd58d9d88,
> we should just silently do nothing if we can't get the home directory.

Yes, this should be skipped. fe-secure-openssl.c is actually doing the
correct thing.

> Poking around, it looks like parseServiceInfo's search for
> ~/.pg_service.conf has the same disease, but that code's been like that
> since 2010 --- I wonder why it's not causing you problems?  Are you maybe
> setting PGSERVICEFILE to prevent that from failing?

Yeah... I was halfway into hacking a patch for that but got drowned
into other things until I saw your message. Are you working on a
patch?
-- 
Michael

Commits

  1. Fix libpq to not require user's home directory to exist.

  2. Allow password file name to be specified as a libpq connection parameter.