Re: Re: Seeking the correct term of art for the (unique) role that is usually called "postgres"—and the mental model that underlies it all

On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 4:02 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> "David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > Yes, the description for --username probably should be modified to read:
>
> > "Selects the user name of the cluster's bootstrap superuser."
>
> Yeah, perhaps. The term "bootstrap superuser" is reasonably well
> established by now --- I count half a dozen uses in our SGML docs
> and another dozen or so in the code --- and it's certainly more
> specific than "database superuser". We should probably create
> a glossary entry for it and then change all the uses of "database
> superuser" as appropriate.
>

+1

>
> However ... it looks to me like some of those uses just mean to
> distinguish between Postgres-specific superuser-dom as opposed
> to whatever the term might mean out in the operating system.
> But I'm not sure that anybody really uses that term for an OS-level
> concept on any popular OS, so it feels a bit pedantic as well
> as confusing. Should we leave those usages alone, or reduce them
> to just "superuser"?
>
>
Upon a third reflection I decided that leaving "database superuser" in
place is preferred; it is fairly pervasive in the code, docs, and
translations. I would suggest documenting both "bootstrap superuser" and
"database superuser", making it clear that "database superuser" means any
role in the cluster that has the superuser attribute while "bootstrap
superuser" is specifically that superuser which was created by initdb and
thus owns all initialized objects including the catalogs in all databases
in the cluster.

I'm not sure what you are referring to with respect to OS-level references
but those ideally will not refer to superuser at all - reserving the
concept for the product. admin/root/sudo or even just os-user suffice for
the few places where the two worlds intersect.

David J.