Re: allow_system_table_mods stuff

Hi,

On 2019-06-21 12:28:43 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > I kinda feel like we should prohibit DML on system catalogs, even by
> > superusers, unless you press the big red button that says "I am
> > definitely sure that I know what I'm doing."
> 
> Keep in mind that DML-on-system-catalogs is unfortunately a really
> standard hack in extension upgrade scripts.  (If memory serves,
> some of our contrib scripts do that, and we've certainly told third
> parties that it's the only way out of some box or other.)  I don't
> think we can just shut it off.  What you seem to be proposing is to
> allow it only after
> 
> SET allow_system_table_mods = on;
> 
> which would be all right except that an extension script containing
> such a command will fail outright in existing releases.  I think we
> need to be friendlier than that to extension authors who are, for the
> most part, trying to work around some deficiency of ours not theirs.

I'm not quite convinced we need to go very far with compatibility here -
pretty much by definition scripts that do this are tied a lot more to
the internals than ones using DDL. But if we want to, we could just -
for now at least - set allow_system_table_mods to a new 'warn' - when
processing extension scripts as superusers.


> > A related issue is that alter_system_table_mods prohibits both stuff
> > that's probably not going to cause any big problem and stuff that is
> > almost guaranteed to make the system permanently unusable - e.g. you
> > could 'SET STORAGE' on a system catalog column, which is really pretty
> > innocuous, or you could change the oid column of pg_database to a
> > varlena type, which is guaranteed to destroy the universe.  Here
> > again, maybe some operations should be more protected than others, or
> > maybe the relatively safe things just shouldn't be subject to
> > allow_system_table_mods at all.
> 
> Meh.  It doesn't really seem to me that distinguishing these cases
> is a productive use of code space or maintenance effort.  Superusers
> are assumed to know what they're doing, and most especially so if
> they've hit the big red button.

I really don't buy this. You need superuser for nearly all CREATE
EXTENSION invocations, and for a lot of other routine tasks. Making the
non-routine crazy stuff slightly harder is worthwhile. I don't think we
can really separate those two into fully separate roles unfortunately,
because the routine CREATE EXTENSION stuff obviously can be used to
elevate privs.

Greetings,

Andres Freund