Re: CREATE USER and pg_user

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 18:11:54 +0800,
William ZHANG <uniware(at)zedware(dot)org> wrote:
> "create user foo with createdb" will create a user with createdb privilege.
> "create user bar with createuser" will create s superuser who can createdb,
> createuser, and update system catalog.
>
> Why not change the option "createuser" to "superuser", or do something
> to make is easier to understand?

Currently being able to create users is effectively the same as having
superuser privileges, because if you weren't already a superuser, you
could just create one to get that access.
Recently there was some discussion about having a createuser ability that
only allowed one to create nonsuperuser accounts. From the development
docs it looks like this is going to be in 8.1. However it looks like
CREATEUSER privilege will continue to be an alias for super user access.
I didn't notice a documentation update for the createuser program and
don't know if it will take the new keywords or not.
For more information take a look at the CREATE ROLE command in the
developer docs.