Jim,
> I know there's issues with using ident sameuser via TCP, but what
> about for filesystem socket connections?
Not all OSes support ident ... Solaris and OpenBSD for two, don't, because
they see ident as insecure.
We switched the default to "trust localhost only" after many, many complaints
by newbies that they had installed PostgreSQL but couldn't log into it.
Other than maybe putting more emphasis on setting up the superuser password
in the tutorial, I really don't think that we should change the behavior.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco