Re: Make hba available to client code

David Fetter <david@fetter.org> writes:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 04:10:42PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> How exactly would exporting those functions help anything client-side?

> Right now, pgbouncer, and aspirational things like it--other
> connection poolers, maybe distributed transaction managers, etc.--can
> fairly easily act almost like a direct connection to PostgreSQL,
> except for some important exceptions. One that's cropped up several
> times is the ability to gate auth by network and user, that being what
> pg_hba.conf allows.

> A conversation with Andrew Dunstan since I posted convinced me that
> the amount of work to separate this cleanly and have it perform
> somewhere in the close range of as well as it does now could be pretty
> significant.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "separate this cleanly",
but if what you mean is "rewrite hba.c so that it works either in
frontend or backend", I don't think I'm going to like the result;
and I'm not convinced that client-side code would find it all that
useful either.  The API, error handling, and memory management would
probably all need to be a great deal different on client side.  And
serving two masters like that would result in an unreadable mess.
        regards, tom lane