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 12:09 PM Bryn Llewellyn <bryn(at)yugabyte(dot)com> wrote:

>
> This invariant must hold if an "ordinary" within-cluster superuser is to
> qualify as the cluster's "bootstrap superuser":
>
> the name of the bootstrap superuser's within-cluster role
>
>
> AND
>
> the name of the O/S user that owns lots of (but not all*) the software
> files that define the PostgreSQL RDBMS, together with the various files
> that represent what users create
>
>
> are identical.
>
>
>
Nope, the name of the bootstrap user is the one supplied to initdb via the
--username argument. Period. It need not match any name on the host
operating system and it will still be the bootstrap superuser's role name.

Yes, the description for --username probably should be modified to read:

"Selects the user name of the cluster's bootstrap superuser." Or just
consider a "cluster superuser" the term d'art...since most people would
just refer to any old role having superuser authorization as being plain
ole "superuser". The fact that is says "database superuser" is the same
holdover effect as the fact that "init db" means "init database" even
though it actually initializes a cluster.

David J.