Re: scram and \password

On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 2:53 AM, Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Should the \password tool in psql inspect password_encryption and act on it
> being 'scram'?

Not sure if it is wise to change the default fot this release.

> I didn't see this issue discussed, but the ability to search the archives
> for backslashes is rather limited.

I'll save you some time: it has not been discussed. Nor has
PQencryptPassword been mentioned. Changing to SCRAM is not that
complicated, just call scram_build_verifier() and you are good to go.

Instead of changing the default, I think that we should take this
occasion to rename PQencryptPassword to something like
PQhashPassword(), and extend it with a method argument to support both
md5 and scram. PQencryptPassword could also be marked as deprecated,
or let as-is for some time. For \password, we could have another
meta-command but that sounds grotty, or just extend \password with a
--method argument. Switching the default could happen in another
release.

A patch among those lines would be a simple, do people feel that this
should be part of PG 10?
--
Michael