Re: parsing pg_ident.conf

On 11/20/20 2:19 AM, Fabien COELHO wrote:
>
> Hello Andrew,
>
>> I noticed somewhat to my surprise as I was prepping the tests for the
>> "match the whole DN" patch that pg_ident.conf is parsed using the same
>> routines used for pg_hba.conf, and as a result the DN almost always
>> needs to be quoted, because they almost all contain a comma e.g.
>> "O=PGDG,OU=Testing". Even if we didn't break on commas we would probably
>> need to quote most of them, because it's very common to include spaces
>> e.g. "O=Acme Corp,OU=Marketing". Nevertheless it seems rather odd to
>> break on commas, since nothing in the file is meant to be a list - this
>> is a file with exactly three single-valued fields. Not sure if it's
>> worth doing anything about this, or we should just live with it the way
>> it is.
>
> My 0.02 €:
>
> ISTM that having to quote long strings which may contains space or
> other separators is a good thing from a readability point of view,
> even if it would be possible to parse it without the quotes.
>
> So I'm in favor of keeping it that way.
>
> Note that since 8f8154a503, continuations are allowed on "pg_hba.conf"
> and "pg_ident.conf", and that you may continuate within a quoted
> string, which may be of interest when considering LDAP links.

Maybe we should add a comment at the top of the file about when quoting
is needed.

cheers

andrew