Re: SET ROLE and reserved roles

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 1:24 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 13, 2016, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 1:10 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
>> >> What I'd like to know is why it rejects that at all. What's the point
>> >> of having roles you can't SET to?
>> >
>> > To use them to GRANT access to other roles, which was the goal of the
>> > default roles system to begin with.
>>
>> Well ... yeah. But that doesn't mean it should be impossible to SET
>> to that role itself. I'm a little worried that could create strange
>> corner cases.
>
> Being able to create objects owned by a default role was one of those
> strange corner cases I was trying to avoid.
>
> What's the use-case for setting to the role..? I would generally argue that
> it's actually to create objects as that role, which is something I believe
> we specifically do not want for default roles, and in some limited cases to
> drop or gain additional privileges, when using noinherit roles (which are
> not the default). The latter can still be accomplished, of course, by
> creating a role which is noinherit and using that.

I don't know that there is a use case for it, but it seems like a
weird inconsistency. It may be fine; it just seems odd.

--
Robert Haas
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