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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: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:25AM

    by Zz9zZ (1348) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:25AM (#230548)

    A good point! I am definitely not experienced with developers across the globe, maybe its a generational tech trend and not geographic at all. Perhaps it is a natural progression as programming languages evolved. Abstract the lower levels and the next group of devs have a different outlook on architecture. Or it is as simple as the architectural choice of Windows vs. Linux, and nowadays developers prefer the streamlined windows method vs. the configurable linux method.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:40AM (#230723)

    Or it is as simple as the architectural choice of Windows vs. Linux, and nowadays developers prefer the streamlined windows method vs. the configurable linux method.

    I think you are onto something there. Although I would probably replace "Windows" with "IOS".

    Not that the difference is that big anymore. Since Windows 8, Microsoft has also been chasing the "you'll do what we say, and you will like it" point of view.