Re: change alter user to be a true alias for alter role - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 06/19/2014 07:18 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jov <amutu@amutu.com> writes:
>> the doc say:
>>> ALTER USER is now an alias for ALTER ROLE<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/sql-alterrole.html>
> 
>> but alter user lack the following format:
>> ...
> 
> If we're going to have a policy that these commands be exactly equivalent,
> it seems like this patch is just sticking a finger into the dike.  It does
> nothing to prevent anyone from making the same mistake again in future.
> 
> What about collapsing both sets of productions into one, along the lines
> of
> 
> role_or_user: ROLE | USER;
> 
> AlterRoleSetStmt:
>     ALTER role_or_user RoleId opt_in_database SetResetClause
> 
> (and similarly to the latter for every existing ALTER ROLE variant).
> 
> Because MAPPING is an unreserved keyword, I think that this approach
> might force us to also change ALTER USER MAPPING to ALTER role_or_user
> MAPPING, which is not contemplated by the SQL standard.  But hey,
> it would satisfy the principle of least surprise no?  Anyway we don't
> have to document that that would work.

After a week of silence from Jov, I decided to do this myself since it
didn't seem very hard.

Many frustrating hours of trying to understand why I'm getting
shift/reduce conflicts by the hundreds later, I've decided to give up
for now.
-- 
Vik