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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: 2, Informative) by Francis on Monday August 31 2015, @08:57PM
He has no interest in merging those changes into any of the BSDs though. People who want it, would have to download a completely different disc and do a completely different install. And that doesn't replace what people already have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:50PM
Seems like he was very much in favor of changing Freebsd, but got so much pushback about it that he has settled for a fork.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:45PM
Probably not. FreeBSD was never run like that. Yes, there have been times when mistakes were made, but *BSD projects are mostly not about ego. Theo, notwithstanding.
The mailing lists are publicly accessible, if you think that he wanted to put it into the release, I recommend going on and looking. For the most part the developers involved with producing the code are just not that interested in ego. The market share is largely a matter of not feeling the need to go around aggressively bullying people into installing the OS or spreading untrue rumors about the competition like Linux did early on.