Re: [PATCH v2] use has_privs_for_role for predefined roles

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 6:59 AM Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> wrote:
> This is similar to bob's access to the default superuser privilege to
> read data in someone else's table (must SET ROLE to access that capability).
>
> But it is different from bob's access to inherited privileges which are
> GRANTed:

Yeah. I think right here you've put your finger on what's been bugging
me about this: it's similar to one thing, and it's different from
another. To you and Joshua and Stephen, it seems 100% obvious that
these roles should work like grants of other roles. But I think of
them as capabilities derived from the superuser account, and so I'm
sort of tempted to think that they should work the way the superuser
bit does. And that's why I don't think the fact that they work the
other way is "just a bug" -- it's one of two possible ways that
someone could think that it ought to work based on how other things in
the system actually do work.

I'm not hard stuck on the idea that the current behavior is right, but
I don't think that we can really say that we've made things fully
consistent unless we make things like SUPERUSER and BYPASSRLS work the
same way that you want to make predefined roles work. And probably do
something about the INHERIT flag too because the current situation
seems like a hot mess.

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