On Monday, October 23, 2023, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Laurenz Albe <laurenz.a...@cybertec.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.
