Date: Sat, 7 Mar 2015 09:24:41 -0500
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
 Adam Brightwell <adam.brightwell@crunchydatasolutions.com>,
 Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>,
 PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: CATUPDATE confusion?
Message-ID: <20150307142441.GD29780@tamriel.snowman.net>
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* Peter Eisentraut (peter_e@gmx.net) wrote:
> On 3/7/15 12:31 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> >> On 12/29/14 7:16 PM, Adam Brightwell wrote:
> >>> Given this discussion, I have attached a patch that removes CATUPDATE
> >>> for review/discussion.
> >=20
> >> committed this version
> >=20
> > Hmm .. I'm not sure that summarily removing usecatupd from those three
> > system views was well thought out.  pg_shadow, especially, has no reason
> > to live at all except for backwards compatibility, and clients might we=
ll
> > expect that column to still be there.  I wonder if we'd not be better o=
ff
> > to keep the column in the views but have it read from rolsuper.
>=20
> I doubt anyone is reading the column.  And if they are, they should stop.

Certainly pgAdmin and similar tools are.  From that standpoint though, I
agree that they should be modified to no longer read it, as the whole
point of those kinds of tools is to allow users to modify those
attributes and having CATUPDATE in the view would surely be confusing as
the user wouldn't be able to modify it.

> pg_shadow and pg_user have been kept around because it is plausible that
> a lot of tools want to have a list of users, and requiring all of them
> to change to pg_authid at once was deemed too onerous at the time.  I
> don't think this requires us to keep all the details the same forever.

pg_shadow, pg_user and pg_group were added when role support was added,
specifically for backwards compatibility.  I don't believe there was
ever discussion about keeping them because filtering pg_roles based on
rolcanlogin was too onerous.  That said, we already decided recently
that we wanted to keep them updated to match the actual attributes
available (note that the replication role attribute modified those
views) and I think that makes sense on the removal side as well as the
new-attribute side.

I continue to feel that we really should officially deprecate those
views as I don't think they're actually all that useful any more and
maintaining them ends up bringing up all these questions, discussion,
and ends up being largely busy-work if no one really uses them.

	Thanks,

		Stephen

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