Andrew Gierth <and...@tao11.riddles.org.uk> writes: > "Tom" == Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes: > Tom> Meh. If the things aren't actually roles, I think this'd just add > Tom> confusion. Or were you proposing to implement them as roles? I'm > Tom> not sure if that would be practical in every case.
> In fact my original suggestion when this idea was discussed on IRC was > to remove the current superuser flag and turn it into a role; but the > issue then is that role membership is inherited and superuserness > currently isn't, so that's a more intrusive change. To cover the proposed functionality, you'd still need some way to select not-superuser. So I don't think this fully answers the need even if we wanted to do it. It's possible that role-ifying everything and then allowing "!role" in the pg_hba.conf syntax would be enough. Not sure though. More generally, allowing inheritance of superuser scares me a bit from a security standpoint. I wouldn't mind turning all the other legacy role properties into grantable roles, but I *like* the fact that that one is special. regards, tom lane