Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> The entire "prefer" mode is a design flaw, that we unfortunately picked as
> default mode.
> ...
> If you care about encryption, you should pick something else
> (require/verify). If you don't care about encryption, you should pick
> something else (allow, probably) so as not to pay unnecessary overhead.
Yeah. The problem with going over to any one of those as the built-in
default is that we can't know whether the user cares about encryption
or not; but all the other choices depend on making that value judgment.
"prefer" is surely an ugly compromise, but nonetheless it often manages
to do the right thing for both camps.
I'm inclined to think that a better answer than changing libpq's behavior
is to encourage DBAs to specify "hostssl" in pg_hba.conf for all external
connections.
regards, tom lane