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yuki-tei
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Hi team,
Greetings. Hope you are doing well and healthy.

What Changed?

Since "Superuser privilege" usually indicates the "Superuser" Attribute for roles, I think it is better to explicitly say "as a root" user, so this would avoid any potential misunderstanding.

@yuki-tei yuki-tei requested a review from a team as a code owner April 16, 2025 04:44
@nidhibhammar nidhibhammar requested a review from EFM-Bobby April 16, 2025 06:30
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@EFM-Bobby, please review and let us know what you think?

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EFM-Bobby commented Apr 16, 2025

We use "superuser privileges" in other parts of the doc (including this page for the 'efm upgrade-conf'), so if we make the change it should be consistent. Can't other users also have the privileges to run these commands with sudo besides root?

Looking through the file history, we used to say "root privileges" but changed it to the current "superuser privileges." I didn't put any information in there about why the change was made, but I don't think it was my idea. It'd be good to know why we switched to this before switching away from it.

@yuki-tei
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Hi,
Greetings. Just for your reference of below:

Can't other users also have the privileges to run these commands with sudo besides root?
=> I tried this before raising this pull request. Since create-standby option is new and require using pg_basebackup instead of /usr/edb/efm-5.0/bin/efm_db_functions, thus the default sudoers.d setting is not sufficient for this alternative.
We must add this if wee need to sudo.

efm ALL=(enterprisedb) NOPASSWD: /usr/edb/as17/bin/*
efm ALL=(enterprisedb) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rm -rf /home/enterprisedb/data

Kind Regards,
Yuki Tei

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Hi, Greetings. Just for your reference of below:

Can't other users also have the privileges to run these commands with sudo besides root?
=> I tried this before raising this pull request. Since create-standby option is new and require using pg_basebackup instead of /usr/edb/efm-5.0/bin/efm_db_functions, thus the default sudoers.d setting is not sufficient for this alternative.
We must add this if wee need to sudo.

efm ALL=(enterprisedb) NOPASSWD: /usr/edb/as17/bin/* efm ALL=(enterprisedb) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rm -rf /home/enterprisedb/data

Kind Regards, Yuki Tei

But that's not related to whether the term "superuser privileges" or "as root user" is used in the text, is it?

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EFM-Bobby commented Apr 17, 2025

In the current documentation workspace, I don't see any instances of "invoked as root" but I see nine instances of "invoked with superuser" (in the efm and epas products). I would prefer the documentation stay consistent unless there is some strong reason to change this.

I also don't understand what this sentence means: 'Since "Superuser privilege" usually indicates the "Superuser" Attribute for roles...' We're talking about running a linux command.

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Here is the PR that added the current text. Note that this change came from a customer request and was approved by the docs team: #5256

So far I can't find any other information about this or who the customer was.

@yuki-tei
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Hi.

Nah, I just answered your question. So it is currently not available to run these commands with sudo besides root, at least, not without extra setups which is not described in the document.

Hi, Greetings. Just for your reference of below:

Can't other users also have the privileges to run these commands with sudo besides root?
=> I tried this before raising this pull request. Since create-standby option is new and require using pg_basebackup instead of /usr/edb/efm-5.0/bin/efm_db_functions, thus the default sudoers.d setting is not sufficient for this alternative.
We must add this if wee need to sudo.

efm ALL=(enterprisedb) NOPASSWD: /usr/edb/as17/bin/* efm ALL=(enterprisedb) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rm -rf /home/enterprisedb/data
Kind Regards, Yuki Tei

But that's not related to whether the term "superuser privileges" or "as root user" is used in the text, is it?

Kind Regards,
Yuki tei

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Hi,

This is just a precaution for those are not used to reading technical documents or Database newbies.
If the document's term is not the general one, it will be easier to trapped by confusion or overlooking, whether the real context is correct or not. Especially for those who doesn't use English as the 1st language, if they use PostgreSQL daily, "superuser" for "roles" will come up first in their minds. We all not want this kind or unconscious term picking and all confusions might happen, right?

Please think of change all 9 parts to "as root user". This is most explicit because it is the general term and familiar for Linux users.

In the current documentation workspace, I don't see any instances of "invoked as root" but I see nine instances of "invoked with superuser" (in the efm and epas products). I would prefer the documentation stay consistent unless there is some strong reason to change this.

I also don't understand what this sentence means: 'Since "Superuser privilege" usually indicates the "Superuser" Attribute for roles...' We're talking about running a linux command.

Kind Regards,
Yuki Tei

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