Feedback-ID: i131946ab:Fastmail
Message-ID: <abf97f0d-79b4-217c-2ea8-d081648d9a6d@enterprisedb.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2023 10:55:54 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0)
 Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.8.0
Subject: Re: improving user.c error messages
Content-Language: en-US
To: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
 Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>,
 "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
References: <20230127000936.GA1998073@nathanxps13>
 <20230127183119.e5jtyh4g2md57ctb@alvherre.pgsql>
 <20230127231507.GA2221340@nathanxps13> <20230207201009.GA450353@nathanxps13>
 <e1bbef97-ed13-f6ad-8d21-b2ebc251394b@enterprisedb.com>
 <20230220190210.GA3481922@nathanxps13> <20230220225852.GA3940888@nathanxps13>
From: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>
In-Reply-To: <20230220225852.GA3940888@nathanxps13>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Archived-At: 
 <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/abf97f0d-79b4-217c-2ea8-d081648d9a6d%40enterprisedb.com>
Precedence: bulk

On 20.02.23 23:58, Nathan Bossart wrote:
>>> Similarly -- this is an existing issue but we might as well look at it -- in
>>> something like
>>>
>>>      must be superuser or a role with privileges of the
>>>      pg_write_server_files role
>>>
>>> the phrase "a role with the privileges of that other role" seems ambiguous.
>>> Doesn't it really mean you must be a member of that role?
>>
>> Membership alone is not sufficient.  You must also inherit the privileges
>> of the role via the INHERIT option.  I thought about making this something
>> like
>>
>> 	must have the INHERIT option on role %s
>>
>> but I'm not sure that's accurate either.  That wording makes it sound lіke
>> you need to be granted membership to the role directly WITH INHERIT OPTION,
>> but what you really need is membership, direct or indirect, with an INHERIT
>> chain up to the role in question.  However, it looks like "must have the
>> ADMIN option on role %s" is used to mean something similar, so perhaps I am
>> overthinking it.
> 
> For now, I've reworded these as "must inherit privileges of".

I don't have a good mental model of all this role inheritance, 
personally, but I fear that this change makes the messages more jargony 
and less clear.  Maybe the original wording was good enough.

A couple of other thoughts:

"admin option" is sort of a natural language term, I think, so we don't 
need to parametrize it as "%s option".  Also, there are no other 
"options" in this context, I think.

A general thought: It seems we currently don't have any error messages 
that address the user like "You must do this".  Do we want to go there? 
Should we try for a more impersonal wording like

"You must have the %s attribute to create roles."

"Current user must have the %s attribute to create roles."

"%s attribute is required to create roles."

By the way, I'm not sure what the separation between 0001 and 0002 is 
supposed to be.