Re: improving user.c error messages

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 5:00 AM Peter Eisentraut
<peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> This is good. If I may assign some more work ;-), we have a bunch of
> error messages like
>
> errmsg("must be superuser or a role with privileges of the
> pg_write_server_files role to create backup stored on server")
>
> errmsg("must be superuser or have privileges of the
> pg_execute_server_program role to COPY to or from an external program")
>
> errmsg("must be superuser or have privileges of pg_read_all_settings to
> examine \"%s\"", ...)
>
> which could also be split up into a pair of
>
> errmsg("permission denied to xxx")
> errdetail("You must be superuser or ...")

I almost hate to bring this up since I'm not sure how far we want to
go down this rat hole, but what should be our policy about mentioning
superuser? I don't think we're entirely consistent right now, and I'm
not sure whether every error message needs to mention that if you were
the superuser you could do everything. Is that something we should
mention always, never, or in some set of circumstances?

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com