Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER

> On 19 Mar 2025, at 05:57, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> BTW, I was pretty seriously disheartened just now to realize that
> this feature was implemented by making libpq depend on libcurl.
> I'd misread the relevant commit messages to say that libcurl was
> just being used as test infrastructure; but nope, it's a genuine
> build and runtime dependency. I wonder how much big-picture
> thinking went into that.

A considerable amount.

libcurl is not a dependency for OAuth support in libpq, the support was
designed to be exensible such that clients can hook in their own flow
implementations. This part does not require libcurl. It is however a
dependency for the RFC 8628 implementation which is included when building with
--with-libcurl, this in order to ship something which can be used out of the
box (for actual connections *and* testing) without clients being forced to
provide their own implementation.

This obviously means that the RFC8628 part could be moved to contrib/, but I
fear we wouldn't make life easier for packagers by doing that.

> * Given libcurl's very squishy portfolio:
> ...
> it's not exactly hard to imagine them growing a desire to handle
> "postgresql://" URLs,

While there is no guarantee that such a pull request wont be submitted,
speaking as a (admittedly not very active at the moment) libcurl maintainer I
consider it highly unlikely that it would be accepted. A postgres connnection
does not fit into what libcurl/curl is and wants to be.

--
Daniel Gustafsson