Re: Support for NSS as a libpq TLS backend

On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 12:06:59AM +0000, Jacob Champion wrote:
> I have a local test suite that I've been writing against libpq. With
> the new ssldatabase connection option, one tricky aspect is figuring
> out whether it's supported or not. It doesn't look like there's any way
> to tell, from a client application, whether NSS or OpenSSL (or neither)
> is in use.

That's about guessing which library libpq is compiled with, so yes
that's a problem.

> so that you don't have to have an actual connection first in order to
> figure out what connection options you need to supply. Clients that
> support multiple libpq versions would need to know whether that call is
> reliable (older versions of libpq will always return NULL, whether SSL
> is compiled in or not), so maybe we could add a feature macro at the
> same time?

Still, the problem is wider than that, no? One cannot know either if
a version of libpq is able to work with GSSAPI until they attempt a
connection with gssencmode. It seems to me that we should work on the
larger picture here.

> We could also add a new API (say, PQsslLibrary()) but I don't know if
> that gives us anything in practice. Thoughts?

Knowing that the GSSAPI stuff is part of fe-secure.c, we may want
instead a call that returns a list of supported secure libraries.
--
Michael