From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Message-Id: <200301090224.h092O7p00351@candle.pha.pa.us>
Subject: Re: Shouldn't .pgpass work with anything which uses libpq?
In-Reply-To: <avijra$2f0t$1@news.hub.org>
To: ljb <lbayuk@mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 21:24:06 -0500 (EST)
Cc: pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org
MIME-Version: 1.0
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ljb wrote:
> > However, your posting brings up an interesting issue.  Our current code
> > makes no distinction between "" as a password, and a NULL password. 
> > They are both equivalent to "I have supplied no password".  If you
> > create a public user with an empty password, "", there is no way to log
> > in as that user, because "" is considered to be "no password".
> > 
> > I don't want to play with this in 7.3.X, but is it something we should
> > consider cleaning up for 7.4?
> 
> There is a precedence for the current behavior. Another DBMS I've used
> takes an empty password for an account to mean "this account is disabled".
> Therefore it is impossible in that DBMS to have a valid account with no
> password. Which to me is equivalent to PostgreSQL saying "if passwords are
> enabled, it is impossible to login to an account with an empty or NULL
> password". I like that behavior.

Oh, OK.

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