5b7e88dbe0
owned by postgres, doing "pg_ctl start" as root could allow a privilege escalation attack, as pointed out by iDEFENSE. Of course the postmaster would fail, but we ought to fail a little sooner to protect sysadmins unfamiliar with Postgres. The chosen fix is to disable root use of pg_ctl in all cases, just to be confident there are no other holes.
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains several language bindings, including C, Perl, Python, and Tcl, as well as a JDBC driver. The ODBC and C++ interfaces have been moved to the PostgreSQL Projects Web Site at http://gborg.postgresql.org for separate maintenance. See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the file HISTORY. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/. For more information look at our web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.