Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2019 12:29:33 -0500
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: rirans@comcast.net, pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Documentation:  21.5. Default Roles
Message-ID: <20191227172933.GP3195@tamriel.snowman.net>
References: <157742545062.1149.11052653770497832538@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
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Greetings,

* PG Doc comments form (noreply@postgresql.org) wrote:
> The title is wrong.   The roles are not defaults; they are predefined and
> privileged.  The title suggests that a user should expect  to be assigned
> these roles.   "21.5 Sub-Administrator Roles"  would be accurate--improving
> clarity over all  and removing any need to explain why postgres is not in
> this list of roles.

"postgres" isn't in the list because there is no default "postgres"
role.  There is a role created that's a superuser role that's given the
same name as the user who is running 'initdb', but you can change that
if you want.  The roles that are listed are, indeed, the default roles
that the PG system comes with- and no others.

> PostgreSQL provides predefined roles which allow access to various actions
> and information  otherwise reserved to superusers.

Oracle uses 'predefined' as the term, while SQL server talks about
"Server-Level" and "Database-Level" roles.  We don't have database-level
roles yet but it seems entirely reasonable to me that we'd want
something like that in the future (eg: a role that's able to read all of
the data from a given database), so I'd be more inclined to go with the
SQL server terminology here, if we're going to make any change.

> Though  a note of the old title could  be helpful to some searchers.

And that we've had them around for a number of years now is what makes
me hesistate to make a change unless it's very clearly a good
improvement and I'm not entirely sure that this is one.

If you'd really like to have fun though, you might check out
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/user-manag.html which talks
about "Database Roles" even though what we have are actually Cluster
roles.  Maybe we should just remove "Database" from that whole section
and just talk about "Roles"...  (happened on this while reviewing what
google returned for various searches while thinking about this change).

Thanks,

Stephen

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