Re: Password identifiers, protocol aging and SCRAM protocol

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> So, the problem isn't Darwin-specific. I experimented with this on
> Linux and found Linux does the same thing with libpgcommon_srv.a that
> macOS does: a file in the archive that is totally unused is omitted
> from the postgres binary. In Linux, however, that doesn't prevent
> pgcrypto from compiling anyway. It does, however, prevent it from
> working. Instead of failing at compile time with a complaint about
> missing symbols, it fails at load time. I think that's because macOS
> has -bundle-loader and we use it; without that, I think we'd get the
> same behavior on macOS that we get on Windows.

Yes, right. I recall seeing the regression tests failing with pgcrypto
when doing that. Though I did not recall if this was specific to macos
or Linux when I looked again at this patch yesterday. When testing
again yesterday I was able to make the tests of pgcrypto to pass, but
perhaps my build was not in a clean state...

> 1. Rejigger things so that we don't build libpgcommon_srv.a in the
> first place, and instead add $(top_builddir)/src/common to
> src/backend/Makefile's value of SUBDIRS. With appropriate adjustments
> to src/common/Makefile, this should allow us to include all of the
> object files on the linker command line individually instead of
> building an archive library that is then used only for the postgres
> binary itself anyway. Then, things wouldn't get dropped.
>
> 2. Just postpone committing this patch until we're ready to use the
> new code in the backend someplace (or add a dummy reference to it
> someplace).

At the end this refactoring makes sense because it will be used in the
backend with the SCRAM engine, so we could just wait for 2 instead of
having some workarounds. This is dropping the ball for later and there
will be already a lot of work for the SCRAM core part, though I don't
think that the SHA2 refactoring will change much going forward.

Option 3 would be to do things the patch does it, aka just compiling
pgcrypto using the source files directly and put a comment to revert
that once the APIs are used in the backend. I can guess that you don't
like that.
--
Michael