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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: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:10AM
Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users, like myself, aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion.
They are mistaken. You may or may not be knowdgeable enough to comment on the quality of the code, but you _ARE_ knowdgeable enough to comment on how systemd (and all of its baggage) fits in with your requirements*. In fact, when it comes to _YOUR_ requirements it is they who "aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion."
*One of your requirements is trusting your computer.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.