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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @10:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @10:37PM (#230497)

    Ever notice that the logo|signage that Red Hat uses doesn't mention Linux at all?
    I'll be perfectly happy after they have let Lennart have his way and there is no more Linux left in Red Hat.

    In the meantime, there are still many ways we can have Linux as it was meant to be--sans Lennart. [without-systemd.org]

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:48AM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:48AM (#230559) Journal

    That's the way it appears to be headed. GNU/Linux becomes RedhatOS.

    What I cant believe is how the rest of the community was sold a big mistake by a commercial vendor. Didn't we learn anything from letting big commercial vendors get in the way? Isn't that why some of us moved or adopted open source and GNU/Linux in the first place?

    I'm flabbergasted.

  • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:45AM

    by M. Baranczak (1673) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:45AM (#230638)
    http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Free.2FOpen_Source_Operating_systems_without_systemd_in_the_default_installation [without-systemd.org] Devuan won't be ready for a while, if ever. Slackware sounds too user-hostile for my needs. I used Gentoo for a while, and it worked pretty well, but that was years ago. I've never even heard of any of the other ones on that list. Anybody have recommendations?
    • (Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38AM

      by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38AM (#230679)

      http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Free.2FOpen_Source_Operating_systems_without_systemd_in_the_default_installation [without-systemd.org] ... I've never even heard of any of the other ones on that list. Anybody have recommendations?

      PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com] is worth a look. And the Slackware derivative Salix [salixos.org]*, a (somewhat) simplified Slack with an easy to use package manager that looks after dependancies.

      *Warning: I went to Salix when I dropped OpenSuse and stayed with it for a couple of weeks before moving on to Slackware; the same could happen to you.

      --
      It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM (#230734)

      Devuan

      If you were happy with Debian before Lennart, try antiX (pronounced "Antiques").
      It's based on Debian Testing but has avoided Lennart's junk.
      They recently had a new release. [freeforums.org]

      They have several spins and as long as you have 64MB of RAM and a blank 700MB CD-R (or a thumbdrive), you should be golden.
      If your box has some modern oomph, this will make it like a 427 AC Cobra.

      -- gewg_