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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: 4, Informative) by Non Sequor on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:13AM
Interestingly here's a spec for the XDG stuff with Pottering's name on it:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html [freedesktop.org]
That spec seems to be a fancy way of telling programs to ignore HOME and put stuff some place else. I guess what's happening here is that now Poettering is having to reinvent an axle to connect two wheels he's reinvented.
I'm slightly bemused by this and all I'll say is that on OS X (and to a lesser extent, Cygwin) the traditional Unix bits seem to continue to conform to my expectations and the whizbang stuff stays on its side of the chalk line and does it's own thing although there are still some interfaces to the Unix side. I don't see why that approach shouldn't be considered good enough in general. It's easier to interface new stuff to Unix than to redesign Unix to build in the new interfaces you think you need.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.