On Wed, Oct 8, 2025 at 5:09 PM Jacob Champion
<jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> > Because the alternative to what you're describing here is to just
> > change the defaults in some new major release, and let the chips fall
> > where they may. People will have to adjust, and one way they might do
> > that is by using a service file to recover the old defaults. Whether
> > that's better or worse than trying to ease the migration with some
> > mechanism like the one you propose here is a judgement call,
>
> My vote is "worse", because while everyone seems to agree that
> `prefer` is bad, no one seems to agree on what the replacement should
> be. So momentum on the list dies quickly. And it's not just sslmode
> that's in the crosshairs; even if we somehow got to agreement on a
> compatibility break there, the exact same discussion is going to
> happen with the next one.
I'm never going to be a fan of the idea of changing libpq defaults
with any frequency, no matter what configuration options we have. If
we change those defaults with any regularity, I think it will cause a
lot of problems for a lot of people. When there's not agreement on
what to change, leaving things unchanged is often the best answer,
because it at least has the virtue of not causing random breakage. I
also think that Andrew raises a good point about the use of
environment variables. That seems like it serves much the same purpose
as a global configuration file, so I'm not sure we should have both.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
