Re: Let people set host(no)ssl settings from initdb

On Wed, 30 Dec 2020 at 15:00, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> In the third place,
> I believe the vast majority of users don't invoke initdb "by hand"
> anymore. The typical scenario is to go through a packager-provided
> script, which almost certainly won't offer access to these additional
> options.

I can't speak to other distributions, but on Ubuntu pg_createcluster allows
a -- followed by initdb options. So at least on Ubuntu any additional
options will indeed be available to everybody. I would hope that other
distributions have the same capability.

I for one would like to be able to tell initdb (pg_createcluster) what to
put in the first column of pb_hba.conf in the same way I can already use
--auth{,-host,-local}= to set the auth-method column. Ideally, for simple
situations (think testing scripts and the like, rather than long-term
installations) the pg_hba.conf could be created by initdb and not changed
after that.