Re: ALTER USER

I am a little disturbed by having NULL mean no expire of password, but
documenting that 'infinity' is the proper way to set no expiration.

Does that disturb anyone else?  Should we hack up the grammar to allow
VALID UNTIL NULL for consistency?

I guess I imagine someone spinning through pg_shadow and looking for
infinity and not looking at NULL as equivalent.  Maybe I should document
NULL is valid too for 'infinity'.

I will apply Alvero's documentation patch with a mention that internally
NULL is also infinity.

Comments?

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca> writes:
> > It may be worth while to change the default for valuntil to be
> > 'infinity'.  NULL implies they will expire, we're just not sure when.
> 
> This is not the only place in the system catalogs where NULL is
> effectively used to mean a default value that could also be spelled
> out explicitly.  (ACLs behave that way, and useconfig/datconfig
> do too IIRC.)
> 
> It's a bit of a hack, but it saves table space and backend code ---
> without this convention the default would have to be inserted "manually"
> since we have no mechanism to supply defaults when C code is forming a
> new catalog tuple.
> 
> I'm inclined to leave the code alone.  But Alvaro is right that it'd be
> good to point out the 'infinity' option in the CREATE USER and ALTER
> USER man pages.  (Doc patch please?)
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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