Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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."


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Valkor on Monday August 31 2015, @06:02PM

    by Valkor (4253) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:02PM (#230318)

    Damn I'm glad I switched my mission critical stuff to BSD. Every week that passes I feel better and better about this decision.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=2, Interesting=2, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:42PM (#230352)

    Damn I'm glad I switched my mission critical stuff to BSD. Every week that passes I feel better and better about this decision.

    Good!

    At this point, if you're standing by System D - Linux, you're either:

    a) Lazy
    b) Incompetent
    c) Both.

    And don't whimper, "wah wah wah it's a business decision that my bosses have made and I can't dare offend them." If you're not quitting and moving to a better job, you should be ashamed of yourself--you're part of the problem.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:17PM (#230383)

      If you're not quitting and moving to a better job, you should be ashamed of yourself--you're part of the problem.

      Harsh words dude, but true.