Horton

Re: Support for NSS as a libpq TLS backend

Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>

View thread View on postgr.es
From: Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>
To: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, 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>
Date: 2022-01-31T21:48:30Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
> On 31 Jan 2022, at 17:24, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> * Daniel Gustafsson (daniel@yesql.se) wrote:

>> I'm counting this and Andres' comment as a -1 on the patchset, and given where
>> we are in the cycle I'm mark it rejected in the CF app shortly unless anyone
>> objects.
> 
> I agree that it's concerning to hear that OpenLDAP dropped support for
> NSS... though I don't seem to be able to find any information as to why
> they decided to do so.

I was also unable to do that.  There is no information that I could see in
either the commit message, Bugzilla entry (#9207) or on the mailinglist.
Searching the web didn't yield anything either.  I've reached out to hopefully
get a bit more information.

> I'm also very much a fan of having an alternative to OpenSSL and the
> NSS/NSPR license fits well for us, unlike the alternatives to OpenSSL
> used by other projects, such as GnuTLS (which is the alternative to
> OpenSSL that OpenLDAP now has) or other libraries like wolfSSL.

Short of platform specific (proprietary) libraries like Schannel and Secure
Transport, the alternatives are indeed slim.

> Beyond the documentation issue, which I agree is a concern but also
> seems to be actively realized as an issue by the NSS/NSPR folks,

It is, but it has also been an issue for years to be honest, getting the docs
up to scratch will require a very large effort.

> is there some other reason that the curl folks are thinking of dropping support
> for it?

It's also not really used anymore in conjunction with curl, with Red Hat no
longer shipping builds against it.

--
Daniel Gustafsson		https://vmware.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