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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:27AM (#230702)

    And su is still there and you can still use it

    They started out claiming the same about all the other things they assimilated. Then the systemd version became required, followed by intentionally breaking support for the Unix(R) way.

    As it stands, you either run a systemd-free distro such as Slackware or Gentoo, or you run full scale Potterix.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:03AM (#230712)

    Potterix

    I like that term. It clearly tells how much it has deviated from the Linux way. Just as we don't usually call Android Linux, despite it being based on the Linux kernel, we also should not use that term on distributions based on systemd.

    Maybe Linus should deny the use of the trademark "Linux" on systemd distributions.

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Eunuchswear on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:27PM

    by Eunuchswear (525) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:27PM (#230792) Journal

    They started out claiming the same about all the other things they assimilated. Then the systemd version became required, followed by intentionally breaking support for the Unix(R) way.

    As in what, for example?

    My systemd boxes are all running ntpd, syslogd and inetd. Just because systemd provides similar functions doesn't mean you can't use others.

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
    • (Score: 0, Troll) by Eunuchswear on Saturday September 05 2015, @08:17AM

      by Eunuchswear (525) on Saturday September 05 2015, @08:17AM (#232548) Journal

      So the systemd haters want to turn soylentnews into slashdot.

      In what way was my comment a troll? Is simply not disliking systemd called trolling now?

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]