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

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: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 31 2015, @05:08PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:08PM (#230278)

    For what reason does it need to be folded into the init system?

    Basically, what systemd has become (if it wasn't intended to be this already) is Linus Poettering's means of completely scrapping all things POSIX and replacing it with whatever he feels like to make it behave more like OS X.

    Sometimes, what he feels like is an improvement. Sometimes, though, it crashes the kernel [iu.edu]. But, and here's the key, his project couples everything together so that you can't take the good bits and throw out the ones that break everything. That this is a complete violation of the basic design principles of UNIX going back to the days of Thompson and Ritchie does not seem to matter.

    Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users, like myself, aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion.

    But a lot of people who are knowledgeable enough, like Linus Torvalds (see above) and long-time contributor Christopher Barry [iu.edu], hate it, in part for the same reasons you and I do.

    --
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Monday August 31 2015, @05:51PM

    by Francis (5544) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:51PM (#230309)

    OK, so it's not a matter of me not understanding Systemd, it's a matter of them making some horrendous choices and then foisting them on other people.

    I can understand that sudo and su are going to have some problems, I wouldn't even install sudo on my system and su itself isn't supposed to be used like a root shell. If I need that, I'd log in as root or just use su -, to get the full shell.

  • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday August 31 2015, @06:55PM

    by mtrycz (60) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:55PM (#230365)

    Last time I checked, Thorvalds doesn't have any strong (positive nor negative) feelings about systemd. Can you provide a link?

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    • (Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday August 31 2015, @07:19PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 31 2015, @07:19PM (#230385)

      Linus' opinion [zdnet.com]

      I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues.

      So except for the design being insane, the code buggy, and the developers rude and unresponsive to the point where he refuses to merge their code [iu.edu], he has no strong opinions about it. Which to me seems like "Except for that one little incident, how was the play, Mary Lincoln?"

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:38PM (#230401)

    Basically, what systemd has become (if it wasn't intended to be this already) is Linus Poettering's means of completely scrapping all things POSIX and replacing it with whatever he feels like to make it behave more like OS X.

    You're mixing up Lennart Poettering with Jordan Hubbard, who is aiming to make FreeBSD more OS X like — including launchd, libnotify, and libdispatch — with NeXTBSD [nextbsd.org] (because "FreeBSD X was already taken").

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Monday August 31 2015, @08:57PM

      by Francis (5544) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:57PM (#230448)

      He has no interest in merging those changes into any of the BSDs though. People who want it, would have to download a completely different disc and do a completely different install. And that doesn't replace what people already have.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:50PM (#231281)

        Seems like he was very much in favor of changing Freebsd, but got so much pushback about it that he has settled for a fork.

        • (Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:45PM

          by Francis (5544) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:45PM (#231339)

          Probably not. FreeBSD was never run like that. Yes, there have been times when mistakes were made, but *BSD projects are mostly not about ego. Theo, notwithstanding.

          The mailing lists are publicly accessible, if you think that he wanted to put it into the release, I recommend going on and looking. For the most part the developers involved with producing the code are just not that interested in ego. The market share is largely a matter of not feeling the need to go around aggressively bullying people into installing the OS or spreading untrue rumors about the competition like Linux did early on.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:22PM (#230429)

    Linus Torvalds "likes" systemd "sees no problem with it". He has been payed off.