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Lennart Poettering Has Merged “su” Command Replacement into systemd

posted by martyb on Monday August 31 2015, @04:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-su-me dept.

CoolHand writes:

The Linux Homefront Project reports on Lennart Poettering looking to do away with the good old "su" command. From the article, "With this pull request systemd now support a su command functional and can create privileged sessions, that are fully isolated from the original session. Su is a classic UNIX command and used more than 30 years. Why su is bad? Lennart Poettering says:"

Well, there have been long discussions about this, but the problem is that what su is supposed to do is very unclear. On one hand it’s supposed to open a new session and change a number of execution context parameters (uid, gid, env, …), and on the other it’s supposed to inherit a lot concepts from the originating session (tty, cgroup, audit, …). Since this is so weakly defined it’s a really weird mix&match of old and new paramters. To keep this somewhat managable we decided to only switch the absolute minimum over, and that excludes XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, specifically because XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is actually bound to the session/audit runtime and those we do not transition. Instead we simply unset it.

Long story short: su is really a broken concept. It will given you kind of a shell, and it’s fine to use it for that, but it’s not a full login, and shouldn’t be mistaken for one.

I'm guessing that Devuan won't be getting rid of "su."

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  • (Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:54PM

    by fnj (1654) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:54PM (#230890)

    This whole page is full of references to one "Larry Potter"? Is this some kind of inside joke? If so, it doesn't work. The guy's name is Lennart Poettering. If you are going to talk about somebody, please have the common decency and ordinary common sense to use his right name.

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  • (Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:29PM

    by GDX (1950) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:29PM (#230994)

    Mea culpa, for cut an paste the name of the post that I replied... I need to pay more attention the next time.

    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:26AM

      by fnj (1654) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:26AM (#231127)

      It's OK; hardly your fault then. What I don't understand is that there are all kinds of posts on the page using that name. Would be nice to know who started it.