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

* Peter Eisentraut (peter_e(at)gmx(dot)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.

Thanks!

Stephen