Re: role self-revocation

> On Mar 11, 2022, at 7:58 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This kind of thing is always a judgement call. If we were talking
> about breaking 'SELECT * from table', I'm sure it would be hard to
> convince anybody to agree to do that at all, let alone with no
> deprecation period. Fortunately, CREATEROLE is less used, so breaking
> it will inconvenience fewer people.

This issue of how much backwards compatibility breakage we're willing to tolerate is just as important as questions
abouthow we would want roles to work in a green-field development project.  The sense I got a year ago, on this list,
wasthat changing CREATEROLE was acceptable, but changing other parts of the system, such as how ADMIN OPTION works,
wouldgo too far. 

Role ownership did not yet exist, and that was a big motivation in introducing that concept, because you couldn't
crediblysay it broke other existing features.  It introduces the new notion that when a superuser creates a role, the
superuserowns it, which is identical to how things implicitly work today; and when a CREATEROLE non-superuser creates a
role,that role owns the new role, which is different from how it works today, arguably breaking CREATEROLE's prior
behavior. *But it doesn't break anything else*. 

If we're going to change how ADMIN OPTION works, or how role membership works, or how inherit/noinherit works, let's
firstbe clear that we are willing to accept whatever backwards incompatibility that entails.  This is not a green-field
developmentproject.  The constant spinning around with regard to how much compatibility we need to preserve is giving
mevertigo. 

—
Mark Dilger
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company