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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:27PM (#230343)

    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)

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Monday August 31 2015, @06:39PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:39PM (#230349)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:44PM (#230357)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:09PM (#230378)

        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.