Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Handle policies during DROP OWNED BY

On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 4:35 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> * Peter Eisentraut (peter_e@gmx.net) wrote:
>> On 12/11/15 4:12 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
>> > As with ACLs, the DROP OWNED BY caller must have permission to modify
>> > the policy or a WARNING is thrown and no change is made to the policy.
>>
>> That warning doesn't tell the user anything about how to fix the
>> situation or whether or why the situation is a problem and what to do
>> about it.
>
> I modeled it after the other warnings which are output by DROP OWNED BY
> when it's unable to perform the requested drop.  I'm not against trying
> to add something, but you tend to get a bunch of those messages at once
> which means having a hint would result in a bunch of repeated messages
> and I don't think that'd be very helpful.  Further, it's essentially a
> 'permission denied' type of error, which generally means that the
> individual who is running it can't do anything to fix it anyway.
>
> I'm not against looking to improve things here, but I don't think just
> trying to make a change here makes sense.  We could throw a warning+hint
> at the end of DROP OWNED, if anything wasn't able to be dropped, which
> provided more information, perhaps.  I'm not convinced that would really
> be very useful to the individual running the command and would need to,
> in essence, be "please get someone with higher privileges to run this,
> or get them to give you permission to run it".  I don't think we really
> want to go there (anyone else recall the "please see your network
> administrator" errors..?).
>
> If I'm misunderstanding your thoughts here, please let me know.

This appears to address one of the open items at
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.5_Open_Items -- if so,
please update that page.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company