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Re: improving user.c error messages

Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>

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From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2023-03-09T17:58:46Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 10:55:54AM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 20.02.23 23:58, Nathan Bossart wrote:
>> For now, I've reworded these as "must inherit privileges of".
> 
> I don't have a good mental model of all this role inheritance, personally,
> but I fear that this change makes the messages more jargony and less clear.
> Maybe the original wording was good enough.

I'm fine with that.

> "admin option" is sort of a natural language term, I think, so we don't need
> to parametrize it as "%s option".  Also, there are no other "options" in
> this context, I think.

v16 introduces the INHERIT and SET options.  I don't have a strong opinion
about parameterizing it, though.  My intent was to consistently capitalize
all the attributes and options.

> A general thought: It seems we currently don't have any error messages that
> address the user like "You must do this".  Do we want to go there? Should we
> try for a more impersonal wording like
> 
> "You must have the %s attribute to create roles."
> 
> "Current user must have the %s attribute to create roles."
> 
> "%s attribute is required to create roles."

I think I like the last option the most.  In general, I agree with trying
to avoid the second-person phrasing.

> By the way, I'm not sure what the separation between 0001 and 0002 is
> supposed to be.

I'll combine them.  I first started with user.c only, but we kept finding
new messages to improve.

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. Improve several permission-related error messages.

  2. Integrate superuser check into has_rolreplication()

  3. Small code simplification

  4. Adjust interaction of CREATEROLE with role properties.

  5. Add new GUC reserved_connections.

  6. Rename ReservedBackends variable to SuperuserReservedConnections.

  7. Update docs and error message for superuser_reserved_connections.

  8. Add new GUC createrole_self_grant.

  9. Restrict the privileges of CREATEROLE users.

  10. Add a SET option to the GRANT command.