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: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday August 31 2015, @06:20PM
Fine, whatever, but get your own OS if you don't like Linux and UNIX. I would be happy with Larry Potter OS or whatever that innovated all these ideas that he doesn't like in Linux currently. Let his OS compete with Linux like all the others do. I've been using UNIX and Linux probably longer than this guy has been alive, and it works fine. We don't need Linux to be changed into another OS. I want to keep using the skills I already have. Everything works great. I don't need a new OS. I don't want one.
So the question is ...
Why is this one man being allowed to change Linux so it isn't Linux? Why can no one stop him? Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:27PM
Why is this one man being allowed to change Linux so it isn't Linux? Why can no one stop him? Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Monday August 31 2015, @06:39PM
The problem here is NOT that good people are doing nothing.
The problem here is that good people are actively replacing the internals of the distributions they maintain with these new broken ones.
If people outside the systemd maintainer community simply did nothing to enable this takeover, there'd be nothing to fight.
The problem isn't systemd. The problem is Canonical, Mint, Fedora, RedHat, OpenSuse, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:44PM
The problem isn't systemd. The problem is Canonical, Mint, Fedora, RedHat, OpenSuse, etc.
The "good people" seem to be moving to Devuan or one of the BSDs, while the rest of the cattle are herded into the RedHat slaughterhouse.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:09PM
Hosting providers are not providing non-SystemD OSes (many third-party software only works on selected OSes). So many people need to work with one of the SystemD ones.
SystemD is being forced. People are being molested to use it. And we still don't know how they plan to use it to control the population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:00PM
Why is this one man being allowed to change Linux so it isn't Linux? Why can no one stop him? Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?
Its propaganda. They are overcoming dissent by leading it. The "leaders" of the community who are opposing this SystemD, and this guy Larry Potter sit at the table at the end of the day recounting the day's activities and how they fooled and divided public opinion. In short, they are the same people.
However, the positive side of SystemD is that the machine boots faster, something rarely done. So that is not a useful quality.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:07PM
However, the positive side of SystemD is that the machine boots faster, something rarely done. So that is not a useful quality.
There's another "positive side" for the suits -- RHCE people can get better jobs diagnosing the completely unpredictable and illogical architecture of this ridiculous "system," and someday aspire a base income previously only known to the leaders in arcane proprietary spaghetti knowledge -- Oracle DBAs.
(Score: 1) by rleigh on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:53AM
In many cases, the "faster booting" is not true either. I've yet to see a system which boots faster with systemd, and from what I've read of others profiling more extensively, it's often only faster in minimal contrived situations.
(Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:41PM
My desktop boots a hell of a lot faster than it did with sysvinit so i'm happy
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday August 31 2015, @08:29PM
The distros allowed this all to happen. I've never been able to understand how they stood for the systemd requirement in Gnome! The entire open source community should have told them to stick that one right up their collective asses. That was totally malicious, and anyone who didn't see it as such shouldn't be surprised at the cluster fuck they're ending up with.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @10:23PM
Said Sun, HP-Ux, AIX (and Tannenbaum)... Why is this Finnish teenager redefining "unix" with this toy called "Linux"?
Just sayin'
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Monday August 31 2015, @11:20PM
He didn't take existing UNIX and modify it until the original system could no longer function without his additions. He created his own system. (In fact, Linus has said that if BSD had succeeded in untangling itself from the Bell IP lawsuits earlier, he probably wouldn't have bothered making his own.)
Fundamentally different.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:02AM
Actually the biggest problem of systemd is Larry Potter himself, systemd as an idea is good but its implementation is really poor, Larry Potter is hindering it with poor communication, a bad implementation due to wanting to implementing a lot but don't actually paying attention to the implementation and a bad response to bug fixing requests or fixing the behavior and defaults as how they are already used in systems.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:54PM
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.
(Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:29PM
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
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.
(Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:44PM
"systemd as an idea is good but its implementation is really poor" - thats a grand statement - what is your qualification for making it?