This creates an initial set of default roles which administrators may
use to grant access to, historically, superuser-only functions. Using
these roles instead of granting superuser access reduces the number of
superuser roles required for a system. Documention for each of the
default roles has been added to user-manag.sgml.
Bump catversion to 201604082, as we had a commit that bumped it to
201604081 and another that set it back to 201604071...
Reviews by José Luis Tallón and Robert Haas
In commit 1ea0c73c2 I added a section to user-manag.sgml about how to drop
roles that own objects; but as pointed out by Stephen Frost, I neglected
that shared objects (databases or tablespaces) may need special treatment.
Fix that. Back-patch to supported versions, like the previous patch.
In general one may have to run both REASSIGN OWNED and DROP OWNED to get
rid of all the dependencies of a role to be dropped. This was alluded to
in the REASSIGN OWNED man page, but not really spelled out in full; and in
any case the procedure ought to be documented in a more prominent place
than that. Add a section to the "Database Roles" chapter explaining this,
and do a bit of wordsmithing in the relevant commands' man pages.
superuser doesn't have doesn't make much sense, as a superuser can do
whatever he wants through other means, anyway. So instead of granting
replication privilege to superusers in CREATE USER time by default, allow
replication connection from superusers whether or not they have the
replication privilege.
Patch by Noah Misch, per discussion on bug report #6264
This can be overriden by using NOREPLICATION on the CREATE ROLE
statement, but by default they will have it, making it backwards
compatible and "less surprising" (given that superusers normally
override all checks).
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
can create or modify rules for the table. Do setRuleCheckAsUser() while
loading rules into the relcache, rather than when defining a rule. This
ensures that permission checks for tables referenced in a rule are done with
respect to the current owner of the rule's table, whereas formerly ALTER TABLE
OWNER would fail to update the permission checking for associated rules.
Removal of separate RULE privilege is needed to prevent various scenarios
in which a grantee of RULE privilege could effectively have any privilege
of the table owner. For backwards compatibility, GRANT/REVOKE RULE is still
accepted, but it doesn't do anything. Per discussion here:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-04/msg01138.php
Stephen Frost
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Magnus Hagander
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon