Forum OpenACS Development: problem with updating acs-kernel

Hi I just updated the core packages form CVS.
I get the following message, that I don't remember seeing before:

To install the kernel datamodel in PostgreSQL 7.1 database user named
in your AOLserver database pools must have the CREATEUSER
       privilege. You must drop your database and user and recreate
the user, answering "yes" when asked if the new user should be able to
create
       other users.

I didn't want to drop the DB as I have already some data there, and recovering from a backaup that might have a different data model might be a mess... I tried

alter user nsadmin CREATEUSER

but didn't work...any ideas?

Unfortunately "alter user nsadmin createuser" doesn't appear to grant the superuser permission to the user.  However, if the user is already a superuser and you remove the permission that works really great!

The need for this privilege will go away when running PG 7.2, at some point.

What you need to do is to pg_dump your database, drop the database and user, recreate the user with the superuser privilege, load acs-kernel/sql/postgresql.sql, then reload your data.

I suggest trying this on a test system before dropping your database and data, though.

You'll get some duplicate function definition errors when you reload but these are safely ignored.

I tried what Don said: I get

RROR:  pg_proc: Permission denied.
DROP
ERROR:  Function 'tree_ancestor_keys(varbit, int4)' does not exist
        Unable to identify a function that satisfies the given argument types
        You may need to add explicit typecasts
CREATE
CREATE
 create_user_col_comments 
--------------------------
 t
(1 row)

DROP
CREATE
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE/PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index 'acs_function_args_pk' for table 'acs_function_args'
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE/UNIQUE will create implicit index 'acs_function_args_un' for table 'acs_function_args'

similar to what I get in the log when I tried to start it after deleting the db.
before this I just did: dropdb mysite createdb -U nsadmin mysite createlang plpgsql mysite other ideas?

Pardon me if this solution is silly, but it seems to me that in openacs we require the database user (aolserver) to have database superuser privileges (after all, the user must be able to create another user and a database). So... why not confer aolserver the superuser identity, without actually creating a new database user or dumping/restoring the existing database, by using the "peer" authentication model? That is, in pg_hba.conf have

localhost all peer openacs

and in pg_ident.conf,

openacs   aolserver  postgres

where "aolserver" is the owner of the aolserver process, and "postgres" is the database superuser? Whoever owns the database that contains the data will now be accessed by "aolserver" as the "postgres" superuser, which should give all access.

Don, am I totally off here?

Well, I deleted the user (for which I had to delete all of its DB) and it worked

Of course a PG superuser needs to do the "createlang" on the database, but this doesn't need to be done by the user who owns the database and who accesses it via the AOLserver driver.