Re: Warning about invalid .pgpass passwords

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> > > Tom Lane wrote:
> > >> I'm inclined to think that maybe we should make the server return a
> > >> distinct SQLSTATE for "bad password", and have libpq check for that
> > >> rather than just assuming that the failure must be bad password.
> >
> > > Modifying the backend to issue this hint seems like overkill, unless we
> > > have some other use for it.
> >
> > I wouldn't suggest it if I thought it were only helpful for this
> > particular message. It seems to me that we've spent a lot of time
> > kluging around the lack of certainty about whether a connection failure
> > is a password issue. Admittedly a lot of that was between libpq and its
> > client, but the state of affairs on the wire isn't great either.
>
> Yes, I have seen that myself in psql.
>
> > I'm not convinced we have to do it that way, but now is definitely
> > the time to think about it before we implement yet another
> > sort-of-good-enough kluge. Which is what this is.
>
> True. Should we just hold this all for 9.1 or should I code it and
> let's look at the size of the patch?

With no one replying, I decide to code up a patch that adds a new
SQLSTATE (28001) to report invalid/missing passwords. With this code,
the warning will only appear when connecting to 9.0 servers. The output
still looks the same, but will only appear for a password failure:

$ sql -h localhost test
psql: FATAL: password authentication failed for user "postgres"
password retrieved from .pgpass

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

PG East: http://www.enterprisedb.com/community/nav-pg-east-2010.do