Re: ALTER ROLES - questions

* Stefan Kaltenbrunner (stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc) wrote:
> ALTER ROLE seems to support ALTER ROLE <name> ROLE <name> - but that
> form is not mentioned in the docs:

It's not really encouraged and is more because (iirc) that's what 'alter
group' did.

> ALTER ROLE <name> IN ROLE <name> (undocumented but seems logical to try
> because CREATE ROLE supports that) seems to result in the following a
> bit cryptic error message:
[...]
> playground=# ALTER ROLE myrole IN ROLE myrole2;
> ERROR:  option "addroleto" not recognized

Yeah, 'alter group' (or 'alter user', one of them) did the same thing,
which suprised me but lead me to not really be too concerned about this
issue.

> I understand that adding/removing role membership can be done by the
> means of GRANT/REVOKE but at least improving the error message(or
> stopping the parser from accepting that syntax) a bit would be nice :-)

Improving the error message would probably be good (though the error
messages in those functions did tend to follow the same "blah not
recognized" format, so if it's going to be changed to something 'better'
it'd probably make sense to change them all).  Having the parser not
accept the syntax would mean splitting the CREATE ROLE and ALTER ROLE
options-which-are-accepted into two sets (currently there's just one set
which both use) which would create quite a bit of duplication...
Thanks,
    Stephen