Re: Poor buildfarm coverage of strong-random alternatives

Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> writes:
> Yeah, there probably isn't anyone needing --disable-strong-random in 
> practice. The situation is slightly different between the frontend and 
> backend, though. It's more likely that someone might need to build libpq 
> on a very ancient system, but not the server. And libpq only needs 
> pg_strong_random() for SCRAM support. It'd be kind of nice to still be 
> able to build libpq without pg_strong_random(), with SCRAM disabled. But 
> that's awkward to arrange with autoconf, there is no "--libpq-only" 
> flag. Perhaps replace the backend !HAVE_STRONG_RANDOM code with #error.

> +1 for just ripping it out, nevertheless. If someone needs libpq on an 
> ancient system, they can build an older version of libpq as a last resort.

The other workaround that remains available is to build --with-openssl.
So the arguments for keeping !HAVE_STRONG_RANDOM seem pretty weak from
here.

            regards, tom lane