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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."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:06PM
So far they are still installing systemd, too. If they can't bother to remove that, I am entirely sure they will not bother to remove su either.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM
So far they are still installing systemd, too. If they can't bother to remove that, I am entirely sure they will not bother to remove su either.
true, they haven't completely eliminated systemd yet. On my devuan alpha2 install, it is fetched in by libpam-systemd. I have no idea whether I need that, and haven't gotten around to removing it.
I'm hesitating lest I make it impossible to log in. But I've been advised I don't need it, and am gong to try it sometime when I have time to reinstall in case it fails.
It takes time to turn a mammoth project like Debian around.
The discussion on the devuan mailing list is strongly in favour of retaining su as something a sysadmin might want to have installed on their system. But it, of course, will eventually be optional.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:08PM
You should make sure that the Devuan people that you refer to have some idea. Otherwise they'll be having a totally uninformed discussion of the subject. After all, pam_systemd is the root of the whole thing with su, here [freedesktop.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:41PM
"The discussion on the devuan mailing list is strongly in favour of retaining su as something a sysadmin might want to have installed on their system. But it, of course, will eventually be optional."
With friends like that, no enemies are needed. Discussing "allowing" su to be installed. WTF
They also rejected adopting any hardening scripts. ("real sysadmins don't need hardening scripts, they remember all the 200 things to configure at every install, go away troll")
They also install systemd by default I hear.
Basically: owning the systemd opposition by "being" it (and doing nothing).
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday August 31 2015, @08:48PM
Hi Hendrik, IIRC libpam-systemd was difficult to remove because gnome-bluetooth and gnome-usershare depedned on it. I just chucked the entire Gnome--good riddance! but didn't the Devuan powers-that-be??
I have about 3 months of mailinglists backlog to read, anything else that's indicative of recent progress? I can't believe I removed systemd in October-November last year. I'm getting a bit impatient.
I weakly agree with Jaromil to keep an inert libsystemd0 or something as a "bear trap": after each upgrade, do an apt-get -s remove libsystemd0, and if it has wrapped its tentacles around the Depends: of the stuff you upgraded, you'll get the helpful APT message: "0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 369 to remove and 900 not upgraded. Do you want to continue? (Y/n)"
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:05AM
I removed systemd just now. libpam-systemd disappeared at the same time. Things still work fine. I had not installed any version of gnome, so that's no loss.
Now there are five more packages that nothing depends on; they will probably disappear soon.
-- hendrik