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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, @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