Re: Upgrading from < 8.1 with users and groups with same name

Martin Pitt wrote:
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> Hi PostgreSQL developers!
>
> I recently got a rather interesting Debian bug [1]: When upgrading a
> pre-8.1 database to 8.1, the upgrade messes up permissions if the old
> database had users and groups with the same name. Since in 8.1 they
> get collapsed to a 'role' there will be a name clash.
>
> My current solution checks for this situation and aborts the upgrade
> if there is at least one name which is both an user and a group (and
> asks for renaming either before attempting the upgrade again).
>
> For an upstream solution, maybe pg_dumpall should detect this
> situation and abort with an error?

I think we decided that the number of users who have this problem and
would be using upgraded pg_dumpall to upgrade to 8.1 is too small. (If
we had realized this problem pre-8.1, it would have been great to have
fixed it.) In your upgrade script, you _know_ they are going to use
your code for the upgrade so it is much more useful for you to check it.

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