Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Use a bitmask to represent role attributes

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 11:34:09AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> > If that's the only consideration for this, well, that's certainly quite
> > straight-forward to change in the other direction too.  The new function
> > suggested by Andres actually makes it really easy to get a textual list
> > of all the role attributes which a role has from the bitmask too.
> 
> We could have that regardless of the representation, if the function is
> defined along the lines of "given a user OID, give me a text string
> representing the user's attributes".  However, that only helps for
> pg_dumpall and any other clients whose requirement is exactly satisfied
> by a string that fits into CREATE/ALTER USER.  The current formatting
> of psql's \du, for example, absolutely requires adding more client-side
> code every time we add a property; whether the catalog representation is
> bools or a bitmask really isn't going to change the pain level much there.

I am with Tom on this --- there is more wasted space in the 'name'
column pg_authid.rolname than by shoving 40 boolean values into a
bitmap.  Adding the complexity of a bitmap doesn't make sense here.  I
also apologize for the late feedback.

Offtopic, what I would really _love_ to see improved is our display of
object permissions:
                                 Access privileges Schema |  Name  | Type  |     Access privileges     | Column
privileges| Policies--------+--------+-------+---------------------------+-------------------+---------- public |
crypto| table | postgres=arwdDxt/postgres+|                   |        |        |       | =r/postgres               |
               |
 

That is nasty user display ---  it looks like line noise.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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