Re: ALTER ROLE documentation improvement

Yurii Rashkovskii <yrashk@gmail.com>

From: Yurii Rashkovskii <yrashk@gmail.com>
To: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2023-09-15T21:25:38Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 1:53 PM Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 11:46:35AM -0700, Yurii Rashkovskii wrote:
> > It appears that 16.0 improved some of the checks in ALTER ROLE.
> Previously,
> > it was possible to do the following (assuming current_user is a bootstrap
> > user):
> >
> > ```
> > ALTER ROLE current_user NOSUPERUSER
> > ```
> >
> > As of 16.0, this produces an error:
> >
> > ```
> > ERROR:  permission denied to alter role
> > DETAIL:  The bootstrap user must have the SUPERUSER attribute.
> > ```
> >
> > The attached patch documents this behavior by providing a bit more
> > clarification to the following statement:
> >
> > "Database superusers can change any of these settings for any role."
>
> I think this could also be worth a mention in the glossary [0].  BTW the
> glossary calls this role the "bootstrap superuser", but the DETAIL message
> calls it the "bootstrap user".  Perhaps we should standardize on one name.
>
> [0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/glossary.html
>
>
Thank you for the feedback. I've updated the glossary and updated the
terminology to be consistent. Please see the new patch attached.

-- 
Y.

Commits

  1. Improve some documentation about the bootstrap superuser.