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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: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM (#230391) Journal

    Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users, like myself, aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion.

    Ah yes, Soviet democracy in action. Only Party members may vote.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:03AM (#230567)

    Do you also assume that when one advocates for freedom they are advocating for anarchy? There is a flaw [wikipedia.org] in your argument.

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by NickFortune on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:27AM

      by NickFortune (3267) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:27AM (#230701)

      So tell me, what level of qualifications are needed before the systemd developers accept you as being qualified to disagree with their design philosophy?

      The bar for agreeing with them is set pretty darn low, I've noticed that much.

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:59AM

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:59AM (#230726) Journal

    In Soviet Russia, systemd superusers YOU!

    --
    Account abandoned.