Re: BUG #14872: libpq requires a home directory

dcwatson(at)gmail(dot)com writes:
> It seems a side effect of allowing a pgpass file to be specified in libpq
> connections[1] is that libpq errors out if a home directory cannot be found.
> I'm building docker images for OpenShift which run as unnamed users without
> a home directory, and since upgrading to the latest psycopg2 (which is built
> against libpq 10), I get an error saying "Could not get home directory to
> locate password file".

Sigh. We keep breaking that use-case... which is unsurprising because
nobody tests it.

According to previous go-rounds, eg commits 5b4067798 and bd58d9d88,
we should just silently do nothing if we can't get the home directory.

Poking around, it looks like parseServiceInfo's search for
~/.pg_service.conf has the same disease, but that code's been like that
since 2010 --- I wonder why it's not causing you problems? Are you maybe
setting PGSERVICEFILE to prevent that from failing?

regards, tom lane