Re: Fix output of zero privileges in psql

On Monday, October 23, 2023, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at> writes:
> > On Mon, 2023-10-23 at 11:37 -0700, David G. Johnston wrote:
> >> I do believe that we should be against exposing, like in this case, any
> internal
> >> implementation detail that encodes something (e.g., default privileges)
> as NULL
> >> in the catalogs, to the user of the psql meta-commands.
>
> > Sure, it would be best to hide this implementation detail from the user.
> > The correct way to do that would be to fake an ACL entry like
> "laurenz=arwdDxt/laurenz"
> > if there is a NULL in the catalog, but that would add a ton of
> special-case
> > code to psql, which does not look appealing at all.
>
> For better or worse, that *is* the backend's catalog representation,
> and I don't think that psql would be doing our users a service by
> trying to obscure the fact. They'd run into it anyway the moment
> they look at the catalogs with anything but a \d-something command.
>

Which many may never do, and those few that do will see immediately that
the catalog uses null where they expected to see “(default)” and realize we
made a presentational choice in the interests of readability and their
query will need to make a choice regarding the null and empty arrays as
well.

David J.