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Lennart Poettering Has Merged “su” Command Replacement into systemd

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

CoolHand writes:

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) 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?"

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