Poll on your LAPP Preferences

As a PostgreSQL admin or developer, you may be asked to deploy a Linux
Apache PHP PostgreSQL application. As you know, and simplifying things
a great deal here, the pg_hba.conf file can be edited in approximately
7 different ways:

* locked down -- no access at all (usually the default)
* trust local access, any user
* trust local access, specific users
* trust remote access, any user
* trust remote access, specific users

And all of the above with or without a password, and with various kinds
of password types, thus 7 different ways, roughly.

As I think about building an installation program, can you help me
decide on how to make my LAPP installations easier in these various
kinds of arrangements? Are there more preferred practices that you can
share?

I was thinking of an install for my web app where someone downloads a
*.tar.gz file, expands it into a web directory, then connects to an
index.php in a subdirectory called "install". From there, they follow
PHP pages to do what they need in setting this up.

If I can improve this process, then a developer can download my web
app, try it out rapidly, comparing it against others, and hopefully
decide on mine because I have made it easy to get started and easy to
customize to their tastes.