Re: Binary in/out for aclitem

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> Wednesday 23 February 2011 16:19:27
> rsmogura <rsmogura@softperience.eu> writes:
> >  On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:20:39 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> ...  But my question isn't about that; it's about
> >> why aclitem should be considered a first-class citizen.  It makes me
> >> uncomfortable that client apps are looking at it at all, because any
> >> that do are bound to get broken in the future, even assuming that
> >> they get the right answers today.  I wonder how many such clients are up
> >> to speed for per-column privileges and non-constant default privileges
> >> for instance.  And sepgsql is going to cut them off at the knees.
> >> 
> >  Technically, at eye glance, I didn't seen in sepgsql modifications to
> >  acl.h. So, I think, aclitem will be unaffected. In any way sepgsql needs
> >  some way to present access rights to administrator it may use own model,
> >  or aclitem, too.
> 
> You're missing the point, which is that the current internal
> representation of aclitem could change drastically to support future
> feature improvements in the area of privileges.  It has already changed
> significantly in the past (we didn't use to have WITH GRANT OPTION).
> If we had to add a field, for instance, a binary representation would
> simply be broken, as clients would have difficulty telling how to
> interpret it as soon as there was more than one possible format.
> Text representations are typically a bit more extensible.
> 
>             regards, tom lane

Here is extended version, has version field (N_ACL_RIGHTS*2) and reserved 
mask, as well definition is more general then def of PGSQL. In any way it 
require that rights mades bit array.

Still I tested only aclitemsend.

Btw, Is it possible and needed to add group byte, indicating that grantee is 
group or user?

Regards,
Radek