With the attached patch, I have verified that long (> 8char anyway)

usernames and passwords work correctly in both "password" and
"crypt" authorization mode.  NOTE: at least on my machine, it seems
that the crypt() routines ignore the part of the password beyond
8 characters, so there's no security gain from longer passwords in
crypt auth mode.  But they don't fail.

The login-related part of psql has apparently not been touched
since roughly the fall of Rome ;-).  It was going through huge
pushups to get around the lack of username/login parameters to
PQsetdb.  I don't know when PQsetdbLogin was added to libpq, but
it's there now ... so I was able to rip out quite a lot of crufty
code while I was at it.

It's possible that there are still bogus length limits on username
or password in some of the other PostgreSQL user interfaces besides
psql/libpq.  I will leave it to other folks to check that code.

			regards, tom lane