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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: 5, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Monday August 31 2015, @04:42PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Monday August 31 2015, @04:42PM (#230261) Journal

    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.

    If you want a full login, wouldn't you just log in as the other user you want to log in as? But aside from that, and I'll be honest, I wasn't totally following the first quoted paragraph, it sounds like poetteringSU will carry over less of the regular login session. So wouldn't that make it even less of a full login than su is?

    Most of the time when I su as another user, it's just to do a specific little thing. I know I'm not everyone though -- is the lack of whatever Poettering perceives as missing from su actually a deficiency? Or is this just another excuse to gut something because it has been around for a long time.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by WillR on Monday August 31 2015, @04:58PM

      by WillR (2012) on Monday August 31 2015, @04:58PM (#230271)

      If you want a full login, wouldn't you just log in as the other user you want to log in as?

      Because if you're Doing It Right(tm) according to the many Linux hardening guides, you're not allowing logins as root. You have to log in as an unprivileged user, then su or sudo -i to a root shell.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:20PM (#230428)

        Why don't we have the bastille linux hardening script anymore.

        Why is EVERYTHING good gone?

        It stopped working sometime in Wheezy, TCL error, can't track it down, doesn't apply any changes.

        • (Score: 1) by WillR on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:16PM

          by WillR (2012) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:16PM (#230895)
          Bastille... that's a blast from the past. I had to use Bastille as a condition of getting a Linux machine connected to a college dorm network.

          The same PC was allowed with no modification when it was running Win95. Even today, there still isn't a facepalm image big enough for that policy...
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Monday August 31 2015, @05:05PM

      by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:05PM (#230275)

      Or is this just another excuse to gut something because it has been around for a long time.

      Probably this. Everyone uses su and has used it likely for a long time. There have been no reported problems with people using it. It seems the intent is to turn Linux into Lindows.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Monday August 31 2015, @11:58PM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Monday August 31 2015, @11:58PM (#230535) Journal

        Actually Lindows was a full OS, whether you cared for its design or not. With Poettering its pretty clear the intent is to turn Linux into just a crippled VM running on top of a cloud connected SystemD, which considering Red Hat's push for cloud computing? Really not surprising.

        What is interesting to me is just how little control the Linux users have when it comes to corporate takeover. Like it or not Windows 10 was a response to Windows user simply refusing to take the "supergigantic smartphone" design of Windows 8/ 8.1 but when Linux users said "We don't want this" when it came to systemd? They were told to fuck right off, even Debian ignored their "users first" charter to tell the users "too bad so sad".

        So I'd say like it or not Red Hat is calling the shots now and they have made it clear that they just do not give 2 shits about end users and without the power of voting with their wallet? Really not much end users can do. Sure there is the fork Devuuan but how long will they be able to last without a thousandth of the budget of even Ubuntu? A year? Two? this is why I've argued "free as in beer" is a bad idea, the power of voting with your wallet is the way end users can force change and without it? Well as we have seen any corp willing to throw around enough $$$ can pretty much just take over the whole show, you either go along or they end up with more and more critical components tied into their "solution" to the point its just no longer feasible to fight against them.

        --
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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:04AM

          by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:04AM (#231124)

          Actually Lindows was a full OS, whether you cared for its design or not.

          Lindows was actually the first Linux distribution I installed (Knoppix was the first I tried). In retrospect I suppose, in a way, it was ahead of its time, it had an app store long before anyone else, but after a couple days I decided to try something different and ended up with Mandrake.

          ...this is why I've argued "free as in beer" is a bad idea, the power of voting with your wallet is the way end users can force change and without it? Well as we have seen any corp willing to throw around enough $$$ can pretty much just take over the whole show,...

          The problem with not having "free as in beer" is that the alternative is a Microsoft or an Apple, or something tending towards them, which is what most users switching to Linux were fleeing in the first place. If systemd becomes too onerous I'll keep trying other distributions, if Linux becomes nothing but a systemd O/S I'll try one of the BSD's. Thankfully, with "free as in beer", I'll still have choices, at least for a while.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by caseih on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:09AM

        by caseih (2744) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:09AM (#230646)

        And su is still there and you can still use it. Nothing in the article suggests that a new su binary based on systemd is being introduced. This is machinectl functionality they are talking about here, people. It does not replace the /bin/su binary in any way, though you could use machinectl instead of su if you wanted to (probably with a alias or script since typing machinectl is a pain). I'm sure the GNU project will maintain su for some time.

        Let's stop the FUD here.

        • (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.

          • (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]
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Monday August 31 2015, @05:50PM

      by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:50PM (#230308) Journal

      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.

      If you want a login shell with su, you say "su - username" instead of "su username". "su username" gives you "kind of a shell" while "su - username" gives you the shell with the environment set up and the scripts run as in a full login.

      But if Poettering actually looked at the man pages for commands before deciding that everyone has been doing it wrong for 40 years, the old way is "broken", and he can do better because he's a genius and his poop doesn't stick, he wouldn't be Poettering.

      • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:29PM (#230345)

        I thought his sticky poop was the main component of systemd.

      • (Score: 1) by drgibbon on Monday August 31 2015, @10:37PM

        by drgibbon (74) on Monday August 31 2015, @10:37PM (#230496) Journal

        Yes and just "su -" for a root login shell.

        --
        Certified Soylent Fresh!
      • (Score: 1) by Eunuchswear on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:44PM

        by Eunuchswear (525) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:44PM (#230798) Journal

        If you want a login shell with su, you say "su - username" instead of "su username".

        And if you read the original bug report [github.com] you'll find that that doesn't work -- "su - root" does not give the same environment as logging in as root (the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable is not set up).

        Poettering, correctly, refused to modify the behaviour of su (it does what it the man page says it should) and provided a new command to do what the users wanted done.

        Because everyone "knows" that systemd developers always reply WONTFIX to bug reports, right?

        --
        Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:50PM

          by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:50PM (#230939) Journal

          XDG_ORIFICE_EXCRETA didn't even exist until about 30 years after su was coded, so its behavior regarding that nonsense couldn't have been part of its original documentation. If Red Hat changed its behavior, the bug is theirs, not su's. All my Slackware man page for su says is that su - should "provide an environment similar to what the user would expect had the user logged in directly." It appears to do that in Slackware, although I did have an XDG_SESSION_COOKIE variable in my login shell that was not in my "su -" shell. Uninstalling the third-party PAM crap I'd inflicted upon my system at one point to try out otpw fixed that by getting rid of XDG_SESSION_COOKIE entirely. Still not sure how or why PAM wanted to give me an XDG cookie.

          • (Score: 1) by Eunuchswear on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:43AM

            by Eunuchswear (525) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:43AM (#231174) Journal

            So you'd rather they changed the way su worked.

            Why am I guessing you'd have bitched about that if they did?

            --
            Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
            • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday September 02 2015, @10:04AM

              by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @10:04AM (#231182) Journal

              Whatever problem they are having is a Red Hat distro-specific issue, not a general issue with the su command, since the issue does not exist in Slackware. Creating a new command in a distro-agnostic software system like systemd to solve a parochial problem like that is inappropriate.

              Since they appear to have painted themselves into a corner by introducing a bug in their su behavior that their customers came to rely on, most likely they should have just patched su with a new flag indicating "no, really, give me a new session, not the old buggy behavior" and been done with it.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:48PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:48PM (#231279)

                What is Systemd is not distro-agnostic, but distro-mutating? Meaning that every distro that adopts systemd ends up mutating into some RHEL/Fedora clone?

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:35PM (#231799)

          The reason that variable was not set was because of a certain systemd pam module.

          Because apparently setting it to the proper dir (as was done before systemd, iirc) would break their session tracking voodoo.

          Ergo, su didn't break anything. Poettering's systemd basically created a strawman situation that allowed Poettering to poo poo all over some very tested by time unix functionality.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:07AM (#230570)

      Or is this just another excuse to gut something because it has been around for a long time.

      Bingo. In the world inhabited by idiot savants like LP, if it is old, it must be replaced, because clearly it is no good.

      Never mind it has stood the test of time.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:25AM (#230700)

      If you want a full login, wouldn't you just log in as the other user you want to log in as?

      No, I want a log saying *who* was logged on as root, and when. Both su and sudo give you that, allowing root logins does not.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by srobert on Monday August 31 2015, @04:46PM

    by srobert (4803) on Monday August 31 2015, @04:46PM (#230263)

    Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users, like myself, aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion. There's actually some truth to that, but even I know what su is used for and what it does. As far as I can tell it's doing it well enough. For what reason does it need to be folded into the init system? Though I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand the technical arguments for and against systemd, something about it just doesn't pass the smell test. I'm glad FreeBSD is usable for me as a desktop OS.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Monday August 31 2015, @05:07PM

      by AnonymousCowardNoMore (5416) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:07PM (#230276)

      Unity. Metro. Ribbon. I could go on but I think you get the point. If you still believe the developers who claim to know better than you what you need, I've no hope for you.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:45PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:45PM (#230358)

        I bet you are a RIOT at an Obama rally.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 31 2015, @05:08PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:08PM (#230278)

      For what reason does it need to be folded into the init system?

      Basically, what systemd has become (if it wasn't intended to be this already) is Linus Poettering's means of completely scrapping all things POSIX and replacing it with whatever he feels like to make it behave more like OS X.

      Sometimes, what he feels like is an improvement. Sometimes, though, it crashes the kernel [iu.edu]. But, and here's the key, his project couples everything together so that you can't take the good bits and throw out the ones that break everything. That this is a complete violation of the basic design principles of UNIX going back to the days of Thompson and Ritchie does not seem to matter.

      Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users, like myself, aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion.

      But a lot of people who are knowledgeable enough, like Linus Torvalds (see above) and long-time contributor Christopher Barry [iu.edu], hate it, in part for the same reasons you and I do.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Monday August 31 2015, @05:51PM

        by Francis (5544) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:51PM (#230309)

        OK, so it's not a matter of me not understanding Systemd, it's a matter of them making some horrendous choices and then foisting them on other people.

        I can understand that sudo and su are going to have some problems, I wouldn't even install sudo on my system and su itself isn't supposed to be used like a root shell. If I need that, I'd log in as root or just use su -, to get the full shell.

      • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday August 31 2015, @06:55PM

        by mtrycz (60) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:55PM (#230365)

        Last time I checked, Thorvalds doesn't have any strong (positive nor negative) feelings about systemd. Can you provide a link?

        --
        In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
        • (Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday August 31 2015, @07:19PM

          by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 31 2015, @07:19PM (#230385)

          Linus' opinion [zdnet.com]

          I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues.

          So except for the design being insane, the code buggy, and the developers rude and unresponsive to the point where he refuses to merge their code [iu.edu], he has no strong opinions about it. Which to me seems like "Except for that one little incident, how was the play, Mary Lincoln?"

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:38PM (#230401)

        Basically, what systemd has become (if it wasn't intended to be this already) is Linus Poettering's means of completely scrapping all things POSIX and replacing it with whatever he feels like to make it behave more like OS X.

        You're mixing up Lennart Poettering with Jordan Hubbard, who is aiming to make FreeBSD more OS X like — including launchd, libnotify, and libdispatch — with NeXTBSD [nextbsd.org] (because "FreeBSD X was already taken").

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Monday August 31 2015, @08:57PM

          by Francis (5544) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:57PM (#230448)

          He has no interest in merging those changes into any of the BSDs though. People who want it, would have to download a completely different disc and do a completely different install. And that doesn't replace what people already have.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:50PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:50PM (#231281)

            Seems like he was very much in favor of changing Freebsd, but got so much pushback about it that he has settled for a fork.

            • (Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:45PM

              by Francis (5544) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:45PM (#231339)

              Probably not. FreeBSD was never run like that. Yes, there have been times when mistakes were made, but *BSD projects are mostly not about ego. Theo, notwithstanding.

              The mailing lists are publicly accessible, if you think that he wanted to put it into the release, I recommend going on and looking. For the most part the developers involved with producing the code are just not that interested in ego. The market share is largely a matter of not feeling the need to go around aggressively bullying people into installing the OS or spreading untrue rumors about the competition like Linux did early on.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:22PM (#230429)

        Linus Torvalds "likes" systemd "sees no problem with it". He has been payed off.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by morgauxo on Monday August 31 2015, @06:21PM

      by morgauxo (2082) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:21PM (#230333)

      It should never pass the smell test when someone tells you you are not knowledgeable enough to evaluate something that you use. If whatever problems he thinks he iis trying to solve were problems for you then you WOULD know.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:24PM (#230340)

      Advocates of systemd...

      ...are idiots.

      • (Score: 0, Troll) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:53PM

        by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:53PM (#231778)

        you are not smart enough to make that claim

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM

      by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM (#230391) Journal

      Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users, like myself, aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion.

      Ah yes, Soviet democracy in action. Only Party members may vote.

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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:03AM (#230567)

        Do you also assume that when one advocates for freedom they are advocating for anarchy? There is a flaw [wikipedia.org] in your argument.

        • (Score: 2, Touché) by NickFortune on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:27AM

          by NickFortune (3267) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:27AM (#230701)

          So tell me, what level of qualifications are needed before the systemd developers accept you as being qualified to disagree with their design philosophy?

          The bar for agreeing with them is set pretty darn low, I've noticed that much.

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:59AM

        by Bot (3902) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:59AM (#230726) Journal

        In Soviet Russia, systemd superusers YOU!

        --
        Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 31 2015, @07:40PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday August 31 2015, @07:40PM (#230403) Journal

      Advocates don't really understand the issue at large themselves. I am sure most of them are in fact said ordinary users who don't fully understand the scope of what systemd does or it's consequences. The only thing they can muster in defense are mundane details like more intuitive syntax & configuration, parallel startup/faster boot time (which isn't that fast to begin with) and a better desktop experience. What ever that means.

      The one thing is that is plainly visible to everyone: systemd has grown, far, far beyond its original scope of just an init system. We are at the point where systemd is becoming an operating system itself. We are moving away from the traditional Unix architecture of loosely coupled components that work together to form a complete system to a monolithic "runtime". We are already seeing systemd working itself into not only the core of the OS but also into the desktop. Pretty soon you won't be able to run a useful Linux desktop without *all* of those components being present. Sure you can run a Linux desktop without systemd/gnome. Just don't expect the more popular software packages to work for you as they will most likely have dependencies on systemd. Thankfully POSIX support isn't going away, the Linux kernel handles that. So we can still run legacy.

      What we are really seeing is a new OS being developed. One which eschews the legacy Unix underpinnings and ideals and moves more towards a new monolithic collection of intertwined software. When you think about it, perhaps moving forward is a good thing. Shedding cruft and legacy is always a good thing right? It may seem so. And there are a lot of people who subscribe themselves to this train of thinking without ever looking at the big picture. Change is good. But change for the sake of change is bad.

      So, if it fixes the old crusty bits, then why is it harmful? It's harmful because it robs us of freedom. Linux is more than a desktop OS for running Firefox, Steam or Libreoffice. It is a collection of interchangeable software that users can craft to their liking. The old mantra: Linux runs on wrist watches to supercomputers and everything inbetween. Some people think this is part of the reason that we don't have a homogeneous desktop. That is false. The Linux desktop as it stands is very complete. It's like moving from a bin full of lego pieces to a pre-formed plastic hunk that snaps onto a base. You can't break it apart or replace parts without breaking everything.

      You want my $2E-2?
      systemd gets OS design completely wrong. Rob Pike said it best in an old article he wrote back in 2000: go for depth, not breadth. Instead of giving us a better init system and PID1, we got a friggin OS instead. Developers, please, make yourself very familiar with the writings at cat-v.org [soylentnews.org]. Some of it may sound silly or arrogant. But the point they are making is the KISS principle is ignored in software design. Rob's article I spoke of is liked at the bottom along with another very relevant article he wrote: UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful. Even though the articles themselves are very old, they still make sense in today's bloated, overcomplicated rube goldberg methods of software development. I largely blame it on the overconfidence of developers who are looking to stand out and make a name for themselves (Poettering certainly has).

      • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:02PM (#230412)

        The problem is that systemd offers solutions for problems software developers have. Nobody else bothers to listen, not to mention to implement any alternative solution more in line with whatever ideals may apply.

        Just take running X11 without being root. That has been a goal when I became active in Linux in the mid 1990s. Logind finally enables that. Wayland will also require logind fornthe same funxtionality last I checked. There is just no other solution to that problem to be had.

        Please somebody start to listen to the need of developers and come up with solutions that do not rely on systemd! Otherwise we will be stuck with that for sure.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Zz9zZ on Monday August 31 2015, @08:25PM

          by Zz9zZ (1348) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:25PM (#230431)

          http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-desktop-74/running-x11-as-root-4175505576/ [linuxquestions.org]

          The entire thread disagrees and offers pretty simple workarounds.

          Sometimes the fact that it is difficult to do something means the developers need to figure out how to make that happen. Security is a real concern, and it takes some very simple mistakes to open the gates.

          For the easiest example, take Android. "Let's make the lives of developers REALLY EASY" they said, and thus it has taken years to implement security controls by default, as mentioned in one of today's articles. Developers could implement whatever permissions they needed. Now they are switching tracks because privacy and security have finally (thanks to a certain hero of the people) become a concern for the general public.

          Poettering has solved many issues, and made it easy to accomplish some rather specific tasks, but so far I have yet to see a single comment from the supporters claiming how much easier it is to code now. There were old and crufty systems and place to be sure, but the scope creep is insane... How people can imagine this is ok is beyond me, I guess its because we're in the 21st century now and all those old people didn't even know what they were doing. I can't believe I'm saying this but where are the code hipsters that think the old stuff is still cool? Another few years maybe, after some major bug/privacy scandal?

          --
          ~Tilting at windmills~
          • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @09:12PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @09:12PM (#230453)

            thanks to a certain hero of the people

            Funny. Your hero worship does not extend to everyone. "It is important to ME, so therefore it is important to EVERYONE."

            Don't be such an arrogant ass.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:37PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:37PM (#230934)

              Thank you echo chamber. May I have another down mod? I'll toe the Party line, Comrade, and dare not speak against the groupthink anymore.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:44PM (#231805)

          1. logind enables nothing. polkit is the active part in the whole shebang. That is the part sitting suid root and doing all the delegation of resource access.

          2. wayland at its core is a svgalib for the GPU era. It is basically there to paint pretty stuff in the GPU buffer and thats it. On its own wayland does nothing, unlike X11. With wayland the WM is the party that does all the device access etc. Thus it is Gnome, KDE and the rest that needs some way to get root grade access to /dev entries. Hence logind (because the forerunner consokekit, that didn't need a specific init sitting as pid1, was depreciated by Poettering) acting as the go between for the WM and polkit.

          3. The reason for X11 being run as root was that it needed access to a bunch of /dev entries. By default those are root exclusive. So running it as root was the quicker way.

      • (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_

      • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:04PM

        by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:04PM (#231740)

        You haven't yet worked out the difference between systemd the binary and systemd the project. The "monolithic" argument is complete cock, the kernel is monolithic, not systemd. whjy don;t you complain about the kernel being a monolith?

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 03 2015, @05:02PM

          by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday September 03 2015, @05:02PM (#231857) Journal

          You haven't yet worked out the difference between systemd the binary and systemd the project.

          I am well aware of this.

          The "monolithic" argument is complete cock, the kernel is monolithic, not systemd.

          You have to grasp the meaning of monolithic before arguing about it. Monolithic in the sense that you either adopt the entire system or you don't. systemd is now working its way into desktop environments and software to the point where without systemd, desktop environments and applications might not be able to run without it. What's worse, since Linux implements syscalls beyond the scope of POSIX and systemd makes generous use of them, porting systemd to another operating systems is most likely impossible or very unlikely to happen.

          whjy don;t you complain about the kernel being a monolith?

          Moot point.

          There are a few big issues with systemd. The first is the system is absorbing what were previously separate components into one giant package (that's why it's monolithic). It's a take it or leave it scenario. The second issue is security. With so many critical daemons being re-written, many new bugs are being introduced. Only time will tell how many of them are major security issues. And I guarantee there will be issues. And third, systemd is killing the freedom of software portability. It's not that systemd is completely bad for Linux, it's bad for everyone else that shares software with Linux and doesn't run systemd. Gnome is going to put stubs in the code to allow for use on non-linux operating systems. But how long that can stay practical is unknown. KDE is now calling non-systemd code "legacy". I guess the BSD people can suck it right? They'll be forced to fork those projects and waste manpower maintaining something that didn't need maintaining.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Michelle on Monday August 31 2015, @08:09PM

      by Michelle (4097) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:09PM (#230421)

      Advocates of systemd are quick to point out that ordinary users [...] aren't knowledgeable enough to participate in the discussion.

      To me, this philosophy just reeks of typical 20-something techie elitism. I've been working with Unix since the dinosaur days and Linux since about '94. So far, it's all worked pretty well. As others have said, it's just a compulsive need to gut something and make changes for the sake of making changes. Poettering & crew just want their name in the spotlight, regardless whether it's for something beneficial or not. The arrogance of people like this is astonishing.

      --
      "Right now is the only moment you'll ever have; so why be miserable?"
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:10AM

      by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:10AM (#230647)

      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.
    • (Score: 1, Troll) by caseih on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:23AM

      by caseih (2744) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:23AM (#230653)

      It's not folded into the init system! What are you talking about? Look, the problem with these systemd discussions is that "ordinary users" such as yourself can't be bothered to even learn what systemd is let alone what it can do for you before you start arguing like this. If you really do want to know what systemd is about, I'm sure people who are up on it are happy to talk to you about it and explain its benefits to you.

      People have this weird idea that systemd is some monstrous, monolithic init system. It's not at all like that. Systemd is not monolithic at all. It's simply a collection of utilities and services, most of which are optional, among which is a very fast and very flexible init system that is simple better than anything out there right now. Systemd services and utilities do depend on core systemd components, true. But many components are for specialized use cases like containers, so those parts simply aren't necessary on your desktop system and most likely not installed. For example, networkd. But for those that want and need such a beast, it's there and it is well-integrated once you install it.

      I use systemd on all my machines, but I only use a small portion of it. I have at most systemd libs, init, and journal, and some of the command line utilities. And, gasp, I run rsyslogd to keep a standard syslog available since systemd preserves the standard syslog interface. I could use the journal if I want or need--it does do finer-grained logging which is nice for debugging--but my syslogs are all there like they always were before. I don't use machinectl and I'm unlikely to need it anytime soon as I don't run containers. So the ability to safely and securely get a root shell with machinectl doesn't affect me in the slightest. I continue to use sudo su - for most of my root shell needs.

      • (Score: 2) by srobert on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:28AM

        by srobert (4803) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:28AM (#230670)

        "It's not folded into the init system! What are you talking about?"

        The title of the article referenced in this story is "Lennart Poettering merged “su” command replacement into systemd". Systemd, I was told by people who are supposed to know, is the new init system in Linux. So you should be able to see how I interpreted that as "su being folded into the init system".

        " Look, the problem with these systemd discussions is that "ordinary users" such as yourself can't be bothered to even learn what systemd is let alone what it can do for you before you start arguing like this. If you really do want to know what systemd is about, I'm sure people who are up on it are happy to talk to you about it and explain its benefits to you."

        Re-read that last part and substitute the word "scientology" for "systemd". :-)

        It's not that I can't "be bothered". It's more that my base of knowledge isn't sufficient to absorb all that those who are up on it want to tell me. What I do understand is that systemd is being vertically integrated into the system in such a way that desktop systems such as Gnome3 and Cinnamon were becoming dependent on it, making them unavailable to those of us who choose to use BSD or Linux distributions that haven't bought into abandoning the "quaint notion" of each tool doing one thing well.

        • (Score: 1, Troll) by caseih on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:44AM

          by caseih (2744) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:44AM (#231107)

          I did try to explain what systemd is. It's suite of services and utilities for managing a Linux system in an increasingly complex environment where things like virtualization and containerization are the norm (CoreOS is a great example). Systemd does provide a replacement for init, but that's only one small part of it. Related services like udev, that are required by systemd and many other services, are pulled into the systemd project umbrella. Such a move only makes sense, since udev is so important. Systemd provides optional services that are of use to containers and virtual machines (networkd for example). When people say such and such is being added to systemd, they don't mean it's being added to an increasingly bloated init. Far from it. Most of the time they simply mean that the systemd project is now including a new utility or service that you are free to use or not.

          Like I say, I use systemd on my computers and I only use as much as I need, which for now is really only the init system. The journal is there, but I don't use it right now; rsyslog still works fine for my purposes. I do like the new config files for setting up services. Way simpler than init scripts, and potentially more secure since complex things like forking a daemon are done by one chunk of auditable code, rather than relying on every daemon to correctly implement daemonization. I don't use machinectl at all, which is what the original article is about, not su. Talk about misleading headline! Though it's fair to say that sudo and su do have serious deficiencies when it comes to kernel session management.

          Sorry that my earlier response was a bit short; most people jump all over systemd without even wanting to understand the rationale, preferring to heap ad hominem attacks on Mr. Poettering or question the intelligence of RH's engineers who are very smart people and really do have a handle on security and implications. Initially many of RH's engineers were resistant to systemd, but they took a long hard look at it and came to the conclusion that it actually does things right. That's why they use it.

        • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:07PM

          by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:07PM (#231745)

          well, if you actually read about what has been developed instead of relying on a troll bait lie of a headline, then you will see "machinectl shell" and "su" are separate binaries and will co-exist. "su" has not been deprecated. do some research.

      • (Score: 1, Troll) by utoddl on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:19PM

        by utoddl (819) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:19PM (#230787) Homepage

        If you really do want to know what systemd is about, I'm sure people who are up on it are happy to talk to you about it and explain its benefits to you.

        Not in this forum. Look at the vitriol above and below. Look at the info to condescension ratio (almost 0.01%) in those comments. Why would anyone who understands why systemd is useful wade into these waters? Life is short enough.

        The reasons for this move were not spelled out very well in the opening paragraph, so it's understandable why there would be questions. That doesn't justify the pile-on of hate. If the system provides sessions and cgroups, and you want to start a root session, it makes sense that you would obtain a new session from the part of the system that generates sessions. Sudo and su can't do that; they are part of existing sessions. Sure, you can get a root shell, and if that's all you need, fine, use them. But if you need a session unpolluted by your user session, this is a much cleaner (i.e. actually has a hope of working) solution.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:47PM (#231808)

        One may wonder if the confusion of systemd the binary and systemd the project is an intentional PR psyops...

    • (Score: 1) by Eunuchswear on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:52PM

      by Eunuchswear (525) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:52PM (#230802) Journal

      As far as I can tell [ su ] is doing it well enough. For what reason does it need to be folded into the init system?

      Maybe you should read the original bug report? [github.com]

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
    • (Score: 0, Troll) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:58PM

      by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:58PM (#231734)

      "For what reason does it need to be folded into the init system? Though I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand the technical arguments "
      1. its NOT folded into the systems, its an optional additional feature.
      2. You don't need to be knowledgeable in most cases of ranting against systemd, most anti-systemd rants are misinformation. Jut read and comprehend before believing any anti-post

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 31 2015, @04:54PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @04:54PM (#230269) Journal

    Any discussion of systemd should be entertaining. I might be informative as well, but it's guaranteed to be entertaining.

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by Tork on Monday August 31 2015, @06:23PM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @06:23PM (#230337)
      When do you plan on being informative? ;)
      --
      🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
      • (Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 31 2015, @06:58PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @06:58PM (#230367) Journal

        I was wondering if anyone would call me on that typo. Should have been "It might be informative as well"

        There, I've been informative. I've informed the entire community that I type faster than I think sometimes.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @05:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @05:11PM (#230281)

    Poettering is being his usual disingenuous self...

    The basic issue is that su does its job just fine. But that job conflict with some infosec voodoo that systemd is trying to do with various pam modules and cgroups in an effort to track "sessions".

    In this effort they decided to zero out a certain xdg variable that tells compliant programs where they are expected to write their files. End result was that if someone su-ed into a different account, the compliant programs would stomp all over settings files etc.

    Here is the thing, without the involvement of systemd things would have worked just fine (and has done so for some time). But still Poettering has the gall to declare su the broken party in all this when confronted with the issue. Never mind ignoring vital differences between su and su -l throughout.

    In essence Poettering is constantly demonstrating a profound lack of understanding of unix internals, and is papering over it with arrogance. And if he actually gets called on it he will slink away and let someone else take the brunt of the fallout.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 31 2015, @05:37PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @05:37PM (#230302)

      in an effort to track "sessions".

      AC has it... its really weird how far systemd is moving away from unix.

      This is why there is pushback, because the existing userbase is being told to F off and go away, our gnome mobile phone OS is no longer for you. And my webserver or database server should care about your little tablet OS GUI weirdness exactly why? Lots of extremely baroque solutions to problems that don't exist and mostly get in the way of "real work".

      Recall the quote "GNU is not unix" now consider "systemd is not unix". And that's OK, people should go away and develop other OS and play with new ideas. After all, most OS devs are doomed to eventually reinvent unix, poorly, so it part of their learning curve. Unfortunately they're screwing up everyone else's work with their learning experiment.

      My freebsd boxes (which used to be Debian boxes) don't really care. Those weird solutions to problems that don't exist are unnecessary. Oh you're going to try to force it in to linux by product tying with gnome/kde, for the distros that still care about those legacy GUIs? Go ahead, my xmonad and awesome workstations don't care. Oh now you're going to sneak in using su instead of product tying bloated desktop environments.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 31 2015, @06:03PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @06:03PM (#230319) Journal

        TFS, TFA, GP and you are finally causing me to come around to the anti-systemd point of view. Mostly, I'm still watching, and listening, but the fact is SU isn't broken. If systemd breaks SU, then it's a systemd problem, and it can't be blamed on SU. So, yeah, someone is full of fecal material.

        • (Score: 3, Troll) by Nerdfest on Monday August 31 2015, @06:44PM

          by Nerdfest (80) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:44PM (#230355)

          Unfortunately, if you're a Linux user you're too late for the most part. A huge chunk of the distros now use systemd. I'm just hoping we get a little use of the bootless updates in the 4.x kernel before systemd fucks everything up and required reboots for patches. It's still beyond me how we got into this mess. This can't be incompetence, it *has* to be malice.

          • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Zz9zZ on Monday August 31 2015, @08:03PM

            by Zz9zZ (1348) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:03PM (#230413)

            I too lean towards the idea of malice, but I think that leaning is more a result of paranoia brought on by the secrets that have come to light over the last few decades. Now that we know how far some have gone to undermine our security and privacy with proprietary systems, it almost seems like a given that there would be a push to get compromised software into all linux boxes.

            However, barring proof we can't make absolute statements. The big hurdle I run into when discussing this issue is that systemd is open source. It basically boils down to: "I trust the experts, and its open source so go find the bad code if you're so sure systemd is bad." Which ignores the multiple VALID issues with systemd architecture.
            Even if there is no inherent flaw with systemd, it is entirely possible that another piece of software could have bugs that propagate through the new system that has its fingers in everything.

            Back to my original point: it is not necessarily bad intentions at work, it could easily be the cultural arrogance and cliquishness that is permeating the West Coast tech scene. Once the possibility to fork is taken from the community, freedom is gone.

            After a quick search on types of authoritarianism to see which type this falls under, I felt this one resonated pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism [wikipedia.org]

            You either drink the kool-aid or you're, in the modern parlance, a troll because the debate has been "settled". The comparison amuses me since right wing authoritarianism is typically the opposite of what you'd expect from this crowd, and the last thing the various committees (that have pushed this stuff through) would think of themselves. Trust the experts, trust the open source...

            --
            ~Tilting at windmills~
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:06PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:06PM (#230417)

              Lennart and most of the other systemd developers are actually from Germany. I guess the west coast texh scene reaches further than I thought.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:19AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:19AM (#230545)

                Hush, you. He's built up a nice little consistent hero fantasy story in his head. Let's not go messing it up with things like facts.

              • (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.

                Opinionated Prose: One tool to link them all, and in the system's darkness bind them!

                --
                ~Tilting at windmills~
                • (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.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:36PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:36PM (#231439)

                I do believe Germany also has a coastline. Although its coast is in the North of the country, there will certainly be a western part of that coastline. I don't know if there is a tech scene there though.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:33PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:33PM (#230850)

              Code is logic, and logic is a road, not a destination. If you start from A but think you start from B, you are unlikely to reach C continuing forward.

          • (Score: 1) by utoddl on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:26PM

            by utoddl (819) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:26PM (#230791) Homepage

            The other alternative is that you're wrong.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Monday August 31 2015, @06:08PM

        by Dunbal (3515) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:08PM (#230323)

        There shouldn't be pushback, there should be a fork. Period. Let him do what he wants in his own little world. But all people do is bitch about it, no one is writing code. Reap the rewards of your apathy.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:30PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:30PM (#230346)

          It's not just Larry Potter.

          It's his boss: RedHat.

          RedHat is behind this. Save your scorn for those tossers! (Well, and a little extra for Larry Potter too).

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:41PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:41PM (#230350)

          There you have, this code is all you need.

          % apt-get install sysvinit-core sysvinit sysvinit-utils
          % apt-get remove --purge --auto-remove systemd

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday August 31 2015, @07:18PM

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @07:18PM (#230384) Homepage Journal

          There is a debian fork: devuan.

          It hasn't yet removed all traces of systemd from debian, it's moving ahead. It takes a lot to make a major change in something as big as debian. systemd is definitely no longer the init system.

          Devuan's second alpha release is running just fine on my laptop.

          -- hendrik

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:34PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:34PM (#230434)

            Why won't devuan revive or package the bastille linux hardening script.
            It always worked, even in early Wheezy. Now it doesn't work anymore: the script never is able to apply or write it's changes, some TCL error.

            Please could you please add bastille. No, it is not easy to do all the things it does.
            Please. Don't dismiss such security hardeners.

            No idea why TCL became "incompatible" with this script mid stable debian wheezy.
            Tried to track it down.

          • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 31 2015, @09:56PM

            by Nerdfest (80) on Monday August 31 2015, @09:56PM (#230472)

            My favourite DE is KDE ... isn't it tied to systemd as well?

            • (Score: 2) by present_arms on Monday August 31 2015, @10:00PM

              by present_arms (4392) on Monday August 31 2015, @10:00PM (#230475) Homepage Journal

              kde isn't no, only Gnome 3 at the moment

              --
              http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
              • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 31 2015, @11:45PM

                by Nerdfest (80) on Monday August 31 2015, @11:45PM (#230527)

                Thanks ... I think I heard it's in the plans though. What a mess we're in. All operating sysems seem to want to settle to a common level of mediocrity. What ever happened to learning from the mistakes of others?

                • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:48AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:48AM (#230595)

                  >What ever happened to learning from the mistakes of others?
                  Payments to some, threats to others (to not give them payments), mostly payments.

                  "We will make your life awsome, just ditch this computer bullshit"

                  If they let men marry young girls and own english country houses without property taxes on the first 20 acres it might even have been worth it.

              • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:00PM

                by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:00PM (#231784)

                LP actually wrote a library for Gnome to use to avoid using logind but Gnome decided to ignore it. Probably a sensible choice in the long run as ConsoleKit is no longer maintained.

            • (Score: 2) by hash14 on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:53AM

              by hash14 (1102) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:53AM (#230614)

              You might find this interesting: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/02/20/101235 [soylentnews.org]

              • (Score: 4, Insightful) by fnj on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:16PM

                by fnj (1654) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:16PM (#230869)

                For those turned off by posts containing nothing but a bare link, with no hint whatsoever what it is about ...

                The linked page says that KDE, as of February 2015, intended to drop "legacy" support for any other init system than systemd, by August 2015. It would be interesting to know if this has in fact come to pass. One would guess "no, it has not", because AFAIK KDE is still running on non-systemd distros.

                The whole question of why a goddam DE should give a flying fuck what init system is running; just what feature(s) of systemd it considers so important that it can't even do its goddam job of presenting a DE without them; is an interesting one.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:30PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:30PM (#230793)

            Plus bodhi and antix are deb based and without systemd. Void linux and alpine linux are independent distros again with no systemd

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:36PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:36PM (#230853)

          The people doing the fork should be Poettering and crew. Let them spin up their own distro and invite people to contribute.

          Instead they have co-opted and absorbed projects that worked fine already, making them ever more difficult to use in existing distros without re-basing to systemd.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @05:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @05:57PM (#230313)

      Nice rant, almost the same one verbatim I've seen copy-pasted from god-knows-where (usually Reddit in these cases?). Really well sourced (yeah...). Insightful. Informative.

      HAH.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Non Sequor on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:13AM

      by Non Sequor (1005) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:13AM (#230625) Journal

      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.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM (#230735) Journal

      > Poettering is being his usual disingenuous self...

      > The basic issue is that su does its job just fine. But that job conflict with some infosec voodoo that systemd is trying to do with various pam modules and cgroups in an effort to track "sessions".

      This is the problem, IMHO.

      I don't expect systemd not to rewrite the kitchen sink because hey they said it from the beginning "POSIX SUX and SYSTEMD IS ALWAYS EVOLVING NEVER FINISHED".
      Now, whether people installing systemd are aware that they are essentially getting into the usual "upgrade for no reason whatsoever" cycle that win, osx and android users enjoy it's another matter.
      So, su fell down, another domino piece. Expected.

      The piece of news is that Poettering doesn't even bother to write down the real reason, which you managed to express in 2 clear lines of text.
      The reason he comes up with is that su is "unclear", "really broken".

      You get it? the author of the original pulseaudio says su is "really broken".

      I repeat: the man behind fucking first versions of pulseaudio says su is "really broken".

      Poettering: the next Elop, but funnier.

      --
      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2, Troll) by novak on Monday August 31 2015, @05:35PM

    by novak (4683) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:35PM (#230298) Homepage

    Long story short: I don't really understand shells but I decided to call them broken and absorb more of linux userland into systemd rather than admit I had a trivial bug and just fix it. Systemd is a replacement for POSIX, but it’s not a good init system, and shouldn’t be mistaken for one.

    FTFY, Poettering.

    It's pretty clear that this is just one more thing for systemd to ingest and subsume so that they can continue their takeover of userland. Redhat is really winning in a big way, and the losers are all linux users. I wonder how many systemd supporters are having second thoughts when they see stuff like this?

    --
    novak
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:32PM (#230347)

      Still waiting on the systemd-emacsd to be created, then systemd might actually be useful.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:11PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:11PM (#230380)

        one step closer for emacs being in the kernel...

      • (Score: 2) by meisterister on Monday August 31 2015, @11:51PM

        by meisterister (949) on Monday August 31 2015, @11:51PM (#230531) Journal

        Do you understand the gravity of what you just said? The clash between program-that-is-an-OS and program-that-wants-to-be-the-OS would cause all of space and time to just stop cold.

        --
        (May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
        • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:21PM

          by DECbot (832) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:21PM (#230897) Journal

          No, as foretold in the Wheel of Time, history will repeat itself. We will return to the age where the program is the OS. Then there will be mainframes to control the users, and then the advent of the personal computer will usher in the dragon^W^W Linus reborn.

          --
          cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Monday August 31 2015, @06:41PM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:41PM (#230351) Journal

      I wonder how many systemd supporters are having second thoughts when they see stuff like this?

      More importantly, I wonder how all the distros that have caved to this bullshit are starting to feel.

      The really big issue I see coming down the road is the kdbus fiasco. If I understand correctly, kdbus in the kernel will become a requirement in spite of the fact that the kernel devs will have no part of it. They've repeatedly told the freedesktop folks that it's mis-designed bloated userland code that has no place in the kernel, and they just keep sticking their fingers in their ears.

      Seems to me this will eventually mean all the distros that have given into this will be stuck with unofficial kernel patches...good fucking luck with that.

      • (Score: 2) by novak on Monday August 31 2015, @07:52PM

        by novak (4683) on Monday August 31 2015, @07:52PM (#230406) Homepage

        I'm concerned about this too. Linux 4.2 just came out and has no KDBUS. From what I hear, it's expected to merge in 4.3- though I hope it'll be longer than that. The big deal about kdbus is that udev (part of systemd for no reason at all) will become dependent on KDBUS and it will use the sdbus API which is also part of systemd. This could result in major issues for eudev developers.

        Thus far I've mainly stuck with linux- linux runs a crapload of tools, and I like to use some of the more obscure ones. My distros of choice are minimal and haven't caved to systemd (though I did use debian a bit), but if the choices are "use systemd," or "write your own systemd and use that," I'll probably stop upgrading linux and move away from it except for legacy versions for embedded development. I've always been impressed with openBSD, so that's probably what I'll have to go unless resistance to systemd stays strong. If at least some distros keep trying to make linux work without systemd or systemd-alikes, I'll probably keep hacking on it for a few more years at least.

        --
        novak
        • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday August 31 2015, @08:40PM

          by digitalaudiorock (688) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:40PM (#230438) Journal

          From what I hear, it's expected to merge in 4.3- though I hope it'll be longer than that.

          Is there any indication of that from anyone other than the freedesktop.org folks? There's a thread in the Gentoo forums following the kernel mailing list around that topic, and it doesn't sound like any of the kernel developer's concerns and criticisms have even been acknowledged, let alone addressed. Even Linus has totally called out their claims of how they need that in the kernel for performance reasons as total BS. It's actually a bit bizarre. It seems as though they have no plans of changing any of it, and are just hoping that the kernel devs give into pressure from RH and the like.

          • (Score: 2) by novak on Monday August 31 2015, @08:52PM

            by novak (4683) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:52PM (#230443) Homepage

            I saw a comment somewhere indicating that Greg was planning to fix it prior to resubmitting it for merging, with a lot of pompous feel-goody words in there about making sure everyone was happy with it but I haven't kept too close an eye on it myself. Now you've got my interest though, got a link to that forum thread?

            --
            novak
            • (Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Monday August 31 2015, @09:01PM

              by digitalaudiorock (688) on Monday August 31 2015, @09:01PM (#230451) Journal

              Here it is:

              https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1004624.html [gentoo.org]

              Seems to me that Greg has been spewing non-answers through the entire discussion. I would take anything from him with about 1000 tons of salt.

              • (Score: 2) by novak on Monday August 31 2015, @09:53PM

                by novak (4683) on Monday August 31 2015, @09:53PM (#230469) Homepage

                Thanks, that's some good reading. Looks like there is some hope that the whole kdbus design and implementation is so bad that Linus will block it, at least for quite a while until they actually solve some of the technical issues (which are apparently even more than I realized- it's a security nightmare). On the other hand, it's fairly clear that the systemd/kdbus supporters' play is to try to ignore the issues and have redhat/greg/poettering/crew try to strongarm the whole thing through as "good enough we'll polish it later." Let's hope that Linus is his usual rude self in the face of such obviously bullshit tactics.

                --
                novak
                • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:40AM

                  by Marand (1081) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:40AM (#230636) Journal

                  ignore the issues and have redhat/greg/poettering/crew try to strongarm the whole thing through as "good enough we'll polish it later."

                  So, basically business as usual for Poettering and company. That's the same argument that led to Pulseaudio's premature adoption to (supposedly) solve problems like software audio mixing, and other features that were already solved in other projects before pulse got released. Release crap, make it a dependency of some other stuff, and then let everyone else deal with making it usable.

                  The good news is that, ten or so years later, pulseaudio is mostly* usable out of the box, so there's some slim hope for systemd, once Sievers and Poettering get bored and move on.

                  * Only mostly, I still find that the best "fix" for audio problems in Linux is usually to uninstall pulseaudio and let programs work with ALSA directly.

                  • (Score: 2) by novak on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:54AM

                    by novak (4683) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:54AM (#230681) Homepage

                    Yep, I've had problems in userland with audio on linux exactly once since I started using it. A couple years back, I put debian on a machine for my wife. It was fine, but then a month or two later randomly she was having trouble with sound. I assumed that she did something stupid, not being a linux person, but no, it was really broken and apparently in some persistent setting that lasted through a reboot. That was when I realized that I had accidentally installed pulse (the default, I guess) so I nuked it and have had no problems since. Pulse isn't _that_ buggy (anymore), but it's pretty pointless because it runs on top of ALSA and it's buggier than ALSA. I've never used it intentionally because there has never been a point in time where pulse offered me any feature I cared about- just another layer of bloat.

                    I have less hope for systemd, though, because by design systemd has to keep expanding. First it has to eat linux userland, then it's going to have to add "features." So if the init system part of it is rock solid in a few years- hell, even the webserver might be pretty well debugged by then- then openofficed or emacsd or waylandd or some shit (which urgently has to be written because what it replaces was really broken the whole time, we'll learn) is going to add bugs right back in.

                    However, while Linus doesn't appear to really care about the changes systemd is making, he is one of the people least likely to tolerate poor code and worse excuses from these guys in the linux kernel. This could be something of a holdup to systemd's proposed takeover- though as I understand it more of a delay than a real show-stopper because systemd can still run over regular dbus- there won't be any unsupported kernel patches over this anytime soon.

                    --
                    novak
                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:59PM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:59PM (#231285)

                      The only thing pulse seems to offer that alsa can't do on its own, is dynamic device switching.

                      This however is only really relevant for the new breed of USB "headphones", where they have a small sound card in the USB end, and some headphones hardwired to that.

                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:50PM

                        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @08:50PM (#231445)

                        It is also relevant for bluetooth headphones. I do love the freedom of using bluetooth headphones, not being tethered to the device the sound is coming from. Now if only bluetooth audio was actually usable on Linux, I've just tried it with the built-in bluetooth on my new laptop and it still suffers from terrible lag and dropouts, like it did the last time I tried it several years ago.

                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:52PM

                          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:52PM (#231809)

                          Bluetooth is sadly highly dependent on the devices being properly charged.

                          Be it audio or HID, the device will start to show lag and such long before the "low battery" light turns on.

                          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @01:40PM

                            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @01:40PM (#232607)

                            That hasn't been my experience, how well charged my headphones are hasn't been an issue, they have worked well up until they run out of battery. However there is an inherent lag with the A2DP protocol that is used due to encoding for high quality audio, but that lag itself isn't an issue it is consistent and easily compensated for when watching video, that wasn't what I was complaining about.

                            From my point of view Bluetooth audio works just fine with Android (it also mostly worked on my Nokia N900 which ran Linux, though that had an issue with interference from its WiFi radio), the lag I experience with Bluetooth audio on Linux is rather excessive, but it is the dropouts when I'm right next to the computer that make it unusable for me. The only "solution" I have so far is to use an external Bluetooth transmitter.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:24AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:24AM (#230608)

        I have yet to see Red Hat (Poettering's employer) walk back any of this ridiculousness. Of course, Red Hat already has plenty of fingers in plenty of pies, in terms of Linux subsystems.

        If it does come to the point of unofficial kernel patches, I hope Linus Torvalds decides to have some fun on the first merge request where he can stomp on this sideshow. Frankly, it's way past time he did that.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:26PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:26PM (#230764)

          Linus said systemd is fine. Where does linus get his money from. A consortium. Where does that money come from. Guess.

          I don't like it.

          Maybe Linux needs to be forked by Brad Spengler of Grsec?

          • (Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:38PM

            by fnj (1654) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:38PM (#230883)

            Maybe Linux needs to be forked by Brad Spengler of Grsec?

            Linux doesn't need to be forked; not by anyone. There are already superb alternate POSIX OSs; the BSDs. FreeBSD and its dependent offshoot PC-BSD come the closest to rivaling the capabilities of linux. NextBSD is just beginning development, and might become another contender. None of these are infected by systemd or ever will/can be. All that is needed is for DE and app developers to stay away from building in any gratuitous dependencies on linux in their code, so they can be readily ported to the BSDs. Mostly, this is only a problem with DEs.

            Since the various DEs[*] are being obtuse and obstinate, a fresh DE called Lumina is being developed expressly for PC-BSD. It is lightweight and very promising; already well along in development.

            [*] GNOME has gone in whole hog with systemd dependency, and the developers are on the record for only caring about Linux. KDE is catching the disease. Even XFree86 is showing definite signs of infection.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by hash14 on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:01AM

        by hash14 (1102) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:01AM (#230616)

        I'm not quite as optimistic. Greg KH is a pretty big fan of systemd and kdbus:

        https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/4/13/645 [lkml.org] (long discussion, but it shows that GKH is a big proponent of pulling in kdbus, and _against_ the technical advice of many others on LKML)
        http://kroah.com/log/blog/2014/01/15/kdbus-details/ [kroah.com]
        https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/13g3ys/greg_kh_mocks_udev_fork_developers/ [reddit.com]
        https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/771055-fun-photo-greg-kroah-hartman-crowned-at-the-systemd-hack-fest [linux.com]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:43PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:43PM (#230855)

          And Torvalds is overly trusting of GregKH.

          Torvalds also seems to think that even with the flaws, kdbus can be pushed into its own little corner of the kernel and forgotten about.

          More likely that once the base is accepted, GregKH and others will be pushing to patch it so that various other sub-systems move to talk to userland via kdbus exclusively.

          Question is if this will get some "we don't break userspace" rantings from Torvalds, whereupon the recently introduced social contract gets thrown in his face...

      • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:14PM

        by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:14PM (#231750)

        "More importantly, I wonder how all the distros that have caved to this bullshit are starting to feel." - they know a lot more than you do hence they took this road.
        "If I understand correctly, kdbus in the kernel will become a requirement in spite of the fact that the kernel devs will have no part of it. " you don't understand correctly which is indicative of your whole post.

        • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:30PM

          by digitalaudiorock (688) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:30PM (#231757) Journal

          Wow...really specific. Seems most people here disagree with you. I guess they don't know anything either right?

          I've been coding in unix since the 80s. How the fuck do you know what I know?

          • (Score: 0) by rtfazeberdee on Friday September 04 2015, @03:28PM

            by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Friday September 04 2015, @03:28PM (#232286)

            so what if most posters disagree, most are ACs who could be just be a few misinformed people. As most of them didn't understand the article and hence all the crap responses to it, i don't count them as knowledgeable on this particular subject. I don't care if you've be coding since Babbage's time, things move on and sometimes the longer you've been doing the same thing the harder it is to deal with new things. Out of interest, are you still using Linux 0.99 and Motif or CDE (or just cli)?

        • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:39PM

          by digitalaudiorock (688) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:39PM (#231769) Journal

          FFS...I just realized that you just joined here to post this shit. Typical. Get a life and go fuck yourself.

    • (Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Monday August 31 2015, @06:58PM

      by mr_mischief (4884) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:58PM (#230368)

      I actually like the init system part of it. The unit files are nice and declarative, and don't depend on a particular flavor of shell. Everything else that is pulled in to get that, though, is worrisome.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:52AM

        by Marand (1081) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:52AM (#230641) Journal

        I actually like the init system part of it. The unit files are nice and declarative, and don't depend on a particular flavor of shell. Everything else that is pulled in to get that, though, is worrisome.

        That's also where a lot of the backlash systemd gets comes from. Linux distros have had alternative init systems for ages without any of this drama, because distros like Debian would let you switch it out without a problem, and changing the init didn't affect other components. There was some backlash with Ubuntu's adoption of upstart, but mostly because they removed the other inits from the repos so you couldn't easily switch back.

        With systemd, though, you get stuck with an all-or-nothing scenario. If you like the init part, you better like the binary logging as well, because it's a package deal. This is especially annoying because one of the "arguments" I've seen from systemd proponents is that it's not monolithic, because it has a bunch of separate binaries, so everything isn't crammed into PID1. That's technically true but disinginuous because the pieces of the systemd "suite" are deeply intertwined. You can, at least for now, avoid a lot of it with a shim package Debian provides, but it's a workaround to avoid systemd, not a way to let you cherry-pick the parts of systemd you might want, because systemd itself is hostile to that concept.

        • (Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:51PM

          by mr_mischief (4884) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:51PM (#230907)

          TL;DR: The binaries aren't monolithic but the systemd system and its packages pretty much are.

          That's the problem in a nutshell. I think I'd like uselessd. I like the unit files. I like the dependency management in the init system. like having a more or less standard process supervisor for free with my init system. I don't want all the other stuff.

        • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:25PM

          by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:25PM (#231754)

          if its technically true then its true, how can it be disingenuous? the systemd binary is the ONLY binary at PID1. There are 3 forced dependencies, systemd, udevd and journald, everything else if optional. Do you complain about your binaries being dependent on glibxxx, try breaking that dependency and see how far you get.
          You get binary logging (which is a text file with an index) but you can configure the system to continue using syslog etc as per normal. The binary logging starts at boot up and continues to shutdown and syslog cannot do that. If you use the journalctl to read the journal for a while, you'll see the benefits. I'm waiting for the anti-binary group to start tell oracle et al to start using text files.

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday September 03 2015, @10:10PM

            by Marand (1081) on Thursday September 03 2015, @10:10PM (#231995) Journal

            if its technically true then its true, how can it be disingenuous? the systemd binary is the ONLY binary at PID1. There are 3 forced dependencies, systemd, udevd and journald, everything else if optional. Do you complain about your binaries being dependent on glibxxx, try breaking that dependency and see how far you get.

            It's disinginuous because, while the statement itself may be true, it's addressing a point that wasn't being made in the first place, while also failing to address the actual complaint itself. It's akin to someone complaining about how they don't like the US government's trend toward ubiquitous domestic espionage and then having a politician argue that it's not a problem because the NSA's foreign data collection hasn't changed.

            When a person (such as myself) says that a problem the person has with systemd is the massive amount of interconnect between parts in a way that interferes with the traditional and well-accepted interchangeable lego-like design, because it makes it nigh impossible to switch out components, an argument that it technically isn't monolithic because it's really a bunch of separate binaries you can't change may be true but it's also a useless distinction in the context of the complaint.

            It's an attempt to steer the discussion into technicalities and semantics to avoid acknowledging the point itself. Kind of like now, in fact; I mentioned the tight interconnect being annoying to some because you can't switch components, and instead of doing anything to allay those concerns (presumably because you can't), you went after a technicality and started arguing about that instead.

            You get binary logging (which is a text file with an index) but you can configure the system to continue using syslog etc as per normal. The binary logging starts at boot up and continues to shutdown and syslog cannot do that. If you use the journalctl to read the journal for a while, you'll see the benefits. I'm waiting for the anti-binary group to start tell oracle et al to start using text files.

            This is more "steer the complaint away from something I can't disprove" language.

            Yes, you can run additional logging, but that doesn't address the tight interconnect complaint still. Nor does suggesting that the logging is better and that if you "use [it] for a while" you'll "see the benefits" . Furthermore, if it's so much better, and so obviously so, it should be able to get adopted on its own benefits instead of being coupled with an init so everyone gets forced into an all-or-nothing deal. Finally, you just tried using an "appeal to authority" logical fallacy in support of binary logging by claiming that Oracle does it too.

            It's all weasel language and squirming.

            ---

            Here's the thing: I don't care that systemd (the init) exists. I don't even care that there's a suite of replacement parts for common system components. I don't even generally mind that distros want to use these components, because it sort of mirrors the BSD style of separating the "core" system from third-party pieces.

            However, I don't like the interconnected nature of the suite as it stands now, because it's being done in a way that isn't playing nice with "outsiders", such as existing software that has filled the same roles for decades. We shouldn't have to run two syslogs just to get text logging, for example; it should be an optional component that can be switched out. Likewise, if someone wants the binary logging but not systemd-init, that should be possible.

            Arguing that "it's better for you" and "you just don't know it yet" and "technically it's not monolithic because..." is grasping at straws. You can say that stuff all you want, but it's not going to make the suite more appealing to people that don't like the tightly intertwined design. (Of course, it's not the only thing; there are other issues with it, but nothing relevant to the discussion that arose from OP's comment)

            • (Score: -1, Troll) by rtfazeberdee on Friday September 04 2015, @03:21PM

              by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Friday September 04 2015, @03:21PM (#232284)

              "It's all weasel language and squirming." no its not. Its all open source so you can replace/change what you like.
              All the complaints are trivial because for virtually every complaint about systemd there is an example of the same within the rest of the system. Tight dependencies (glibxx), monoliths (kernel) for which no-one complains about. if systemd had been written and designed by LTorvalds instead of LPoettering then it will be celebrated. Its more of a hate campaign against LP using trivial complaints about systemd as an excuse.

              "Arguing that "it's better for you" and "you just don't know it yet" and "technically it's not monolithic because..." is grasping at straws." sorry, but its true that the new logging is far better than the current system and systemd is not monlithic - its grasping at straws when people say the opposite.

              • (Score: 2) by novak on Thursday September 10 2015, @03:13AM

                by novak (4683) on Thursday September 10 2015, @03:13AM (#234495) Homepage

                Seems like you genuinely have a misunderstanding about what people are trying to say here.

                When they say that systemd is monolithic, they don't mean that it's a single binary file, or that it's all in PID1. Because it's not, obviously. What they are saying is that systemd does not work well with any other programs and it's almost impossible to change out components, which are often connected by unstable APIs. I mean, I guess it's better that there's less complexity in PID1 but it really doesn't help me modify anything.

                And the whole binary logging thing- this is just ridiculous. Systemd does not support any form of logging except these binary logs, ok? It can hand the logs off in a different format, but every log goes through journald in a binary format. Claiming otherwise is like saying you can drive from California to your friend's house in Hawaii because you rent a car at the airport.

                Its more of a hate campaign against LP using trivial complaints about systemd as an excuse.

                It's interesting to note that there have been many, many different init systems which implement at least parts of systemd's design and were improvements on sysVinit from a technical perspective. http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ [darknedgy.net] Hardly anyone ever bothered to insult any of them, if anything they just declined to use them. Most of the hate that systemd has managed to generate is because of the way that it integrates with things like udev, making it pretty hard for anyone to use any other init system- in some ways kind of a rude move because udev already worked with other inits but they removed support. This in turn left projects like Gnome which want to integrate with hardware management the choice of requiring systemd or offering worse integration. When people complain about this they are usually instantly flamed as "haters," and publicly insulted, even in cases like Gentoo where all they asked was for systemd not to retroactively remove support in udev for other init systems. Systemd has really worked fairly hard to generate the kind of hatred that it has.

                --
                novak
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by M. Baranczak on Monday August 31 2015, @07:36PM

      by M. Baranczak (1673) on Monday August 31 2015, @07:36PM (#230398)

      I wonder how many systemd supporters are having second thoughts when they see stuff like this?

      I was on the fence about systemd for a long time, until now. The su command has been around for decades, it only does one thing, and there's no lack of documentation - now this guy is saying its purpose is unclear? Are you fucking serious?

      • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:32PM

        by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:32PM (#231761)

        read about it before taking an opinion based on a flawed interpretation from a poster. its an additional feature mainly for use with containers and NOT a replacement "su" - "su" is NOT deprecated or removed.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by https on Monday August 31 2015, @05:58PM

    by https (5248) on Monday August 31 2015, @05:58PM (#230314) Journal

    I always thought that the su command's purpose was 100% clear: substitute user. That is, I like my set of environment variables, for the most part, but I wish I was someone else. The linux manpage explicitly confirms it: "The current environment is passed to the new shell."

    That Poettering can claim with any semblance of a straight face that su is unclear in either principle or practice should convince thinking observers that this dude is not to be believed in any statement, including his (or maybe her?) name and employer.

    BSD, here I come...

    --
    Offended and laughing about it.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @05:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @05:58PM (#230315)

    Systemd really sucks at communication:-( This is far from the big deal that is made out of it:-(

    Machinectl is used to manage containers and VMs. Machinectl she'll is used to get a shell into one of those containers. For that it needs to put the shell into the right namespaces, so that it sees the network/kids/whatnot from inside the container and not those of the host. Su does not do that for obvious reasons:-) machinectl shell also has to change the uid/gid, so -- since the host running the container is just another namespace -- it can *also* be used to get a shell for another user on the host, pretty much like su.

    Machinectl actually jumps through hoops to get you the same behavior and settings that a login gets you, which is something su does not do. So conceptually it is easier to understand than su, which gets you into a strange mix of old and new environment variables. That is something I think is valuable, considering how much havok I have seen due to environment variables being taken from the "old" into the "new" environment by su and sudo.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:07PM (#230322)

      Then it should be containerctl and not machinectl because neither myself or anyone else I know uses containers on our OS installs.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:13PM (#230328)

        So why do you care what it is called? You won't need that command one way or another.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:21PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:21PM (#230336)

          So why do you care what it is called? You won't need that command one way or another.

          Oh, you're nearly there. I don't need anything relating to containers and all that code should be split out into a separate package. Feel free to research the UNIX philosophy and minimizing attack surface by not installing redundant code on your own time!

          • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:48PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:48PM (#230360)

            Don't forget the sections on acting condescending, treating people like idiots, and attacking anything mainstream as essentially an arbiter of the apocalypse.

            • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:07PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:07PM (#230377)

              Mainstream is usually just that though.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:54AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:54AM (#230725)

              treating people like idiots

              You mean, like Poettering does?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:16PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:16PM (#230382)

            > Oh, you're nearly there. I don't need anything relating to containers and all that code should be split out into a separate package.

            The technology to enable containers is a pretty core part of the kernel nowadays.

            The same technology that systemd uses to provide a read-only copy of /usr to daemons to run with and to prevent them from accessing anything in /home (if that is not needed). The same technology that blocks long running processes from meddling and even seeing processes they do not need to care about. The same that stops those services that do not need that from accessing the network. Those are pretty cool features that limit the attack surface.

            Having a tiny binary that can run containers and VMs installed by harnessing the technology that is built into the kernel does very little harm compared to all that -- and you are free to remove that binary if you are worried, too.

            I won't stop you from reading up on the stuff you talk about on your own time.

          • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:36PM

            by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:36PM (#231765)

            they unfortunately named the project systemd as well as the binary systemd and some fools cannot see/understand the difference between a binary and a project of binaries. Search out "Linux From Scratch" and roll your own if you don't like your distros packaging. You do not need to use this optional binary.

    • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday August 31 2015, @08:13PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:13PM (#230424) Journal

      So what is the issue here, really?

      Su is from decades before cgroups were invented, therefore a shell spawned by su will see the same cgroups "environment" as its invoker, whereas you'd want to su to a combination of { userid within a container , cgroup describing that container } instead of just su { username which is a one-to-one mapping with a unique userid }?

      I'm still unfamiliar with the terminology, so don't bite my head off.

      In that case, is the reason that su can't be rewritten to add that cgroup option, that systemd claims to be the only agent on the system that can grant that permission?

      I don't see a problem with an init system like:

      - boot
      - cgmanager program starts, parses a simple text file with the executable file names that are allowed to give it commands, closes that text file, goes to background
      - sysvinit or systemd or whatever starts and does all the init stuff

      then, /bin/su can be invoked with --username=i_d_rather_be_lord_of_the_Pit_than_servant_in_Heaven --cgroup=/some/really/deep/down/vm/in/a/sandbox/in/a/container , try to fork a cgmanager command, and it works if /bin/su(*) was on the list, and the invoking user at the umpteen-levels deep invoking cgroup (container, VM, chroot, qemu execution, younameit) has the right to do that (correct UNIX group, or correct security context). or something.

      (*) ok, this is probably a different /bin/su than the boot-level "outer" /bin/su .. I'm getting a headache.. you know what I mean though..

      Why all this "highlanderism" with "there can be only ONE to use cgroups"? Aren't they a filesystem-like tree? So, can't you grant permission to manage subtrees to sub-programs?

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Valkor on Monday August 31 2015, @06:02PM

    by Valkor (4253) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:02PM (#230318)

    Damn I'm glad I switched my mission critical stuff to BSD. Every week that passes I feel better and better about this decision.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:42PM (#230352)

      Damn I'm glad I switched my mission critical stuff to BSD. Every week that passes I feel better and better about this decision.

      Good!

      At this point, if you're standing by System D - Linux, you're either:

      a) Lazy
      b) Incompetent
      c) Both.

      And don't whimper, "wah wah wah it's a business decision that my bosses have made and I can't dare offend them." If you're not quitting and moving to a better job, you should be ashamed of yourself--you're part of the problem.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:17PM (#230383)

        If you're not quitting and moving to a better job, you should be ashamed of yourself--you're part of the problem.

        Harsh words dude, but true.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:06PM (#230321)

    So far they are still installing systemd, too. If they can't bother to remove that, I am entirely sure they will not bother to remove su either.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @07:29PM (#230392) Homepage Journal

      So far they are still installing systemd, too. If they can't bother to remove that, I am entirely sure they will not bother to remove su either.

      true, they haven't completely eliminated systemd yet. On my devuan alpha2 install, it is fetched in by libpam-systemd. I have no idea whether I need that, and haven't gotten around to removing it.

      I'm hesitating lest I make it impossible to log in. But I've been advised I don't need it, and am gong to try it sometime when I have time to reinstall in case it fails.

      It takes time to turn a mammoth project like Debian around.

      The discussion on the devuan mailing list is strongly in favour of retaining su as something a sysadmin might want to have installed on their system. But it, of course, will eventually be optional.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:08PM (#230419)

        … libpam-systemd. I have no idea whether I need that …

        You should make sure that the Devuan people that you refer to have some idea. Otherwise they'll be having a totally uninformed discussion of the subject. After all, pam_systemd is the root of the whole thing with su, here [freedesktop.org].

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:41PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:41PM (#230439)

        "The discussion on the devuan mailing list is strongly in favour of retaining su as something a sysadmin might want to have installed on their system. But it, of course, will eventually be optional."

        With friends like that, no enemies are needed. Discussing "allowing" su to be installed. WTF

        They also rejected adopting any hardening scripts. ("real sysadmins don't need hardening scripts, they remember all the 200 things to configure at every install, go away troll")

        They also install systemd by default I hear.

        Basically: owning the systemd opposition by "being" it (and doing nothing).

      • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday August 31 2015, @08:48PM

        by fritsd (4586) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:48PM (#230441) Journal

        Hi Hendrik, IIRC libpam-systemd was difficult to remove because gnome-bluetooth and gnome-usershare depedned on it. I just chucked the entire Gnome--good riddance! but didn't the Devuan powers-that-be??

        I have about 3 months of mailinglists backlog to read, anything else that's indicative of recent progress? I can't believe I removed systemd in October-November last year. I'm getting a bit impatient.

        I weakly agree with Jaromil to keep an inert libsystemd0 or something as a "bear trap": after each upgrade, do an apt-get -s remove libsystemd0, and if it has wrapped its tentacles around the Depends: of the stuff you upgraded, you'll get the helpful APT message: "0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 369 to remove and 900 not upgraded. Do you want to continue? (Y/n)"

        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:05AM

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:05AM (#230569) Homepage Journal

          I removed systemd just now. libpam-systemd disappeared at the same time. Things still work fine. I had not installed any version of gnome, so that's no loss.

          Now there are five more packages that nothing depends on; they will probably disappear soon.

          -- hendrik

  • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday August 31 2015, @06:19PM

    by digitalaudiorock (688) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:19PM (#230331) Journal

    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.

    If "su -", that is inheriting the entire root ENV, isn't a "full login" I hate to think what his horrific idea of a "full login" is...it wouldn't surprise me if in involved HKEY_CURRENT_USER ffs.

    Typical of this asshat..."I don't understand it" = "it's broken" = "I know better than everyone who's come before me" = "let's reinvent the fucking wheel".

    When are the reigns of our OS going to get taken from this guy already?

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday August 31 2015, @06:59PM

      by Francis (5544) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:59PM (#230369)

      When are they going to take them away from Mark. He's been breaking things for years with no particular recourse. Or, how about the folks running Fx.

      It seems like some of these projects come off the rails and nobody can be bothered to tell the people running them that they need to put on some freaking pants.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:26PM (#230390)

      Indeed, when will his reign at the reins end?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday August 31 2015, @06:20PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:20PM (#230332)

    Fine, whatever, but get your own OS if you don't like Linux and UNIX. I would be happy with Larry Potter OS or whatever that innovated all these ideas that he doesn't like in Linux currently. Let his OS compete with Linux like all the others do. I've been using UNIX and Linux probably longer than this guy has been alive, and it works fine. We don't need Linux to be changed into another OS. I want to keep using the skills I already have. Everything works great. I don't need a new OS. I don't want one.

    So the question is ...

    Why is this one man being allowed to change Linux so it isn't Linux? Why can no one stop him? Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:27PM (#230343)

      Why is this one man being allowed to change Linux so it isn't Linux? Why can no one stop him? Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?

      "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Monday August 31 2015, @06:39PM

        by MrGuy (1007) on Monday August 31 2015, @06:39PM (#230349)

        The problem here is NOT that good people are doing nothing.

        The problem here is that good people are actively replacing the internals of the distributions they maintain with these new broken ones.

        If people outside the systemd maintainer community simply did nothing to enable this takeover, there'd be nothing to fight.

        The problem isn't systemd. The problem is Canonical, Mint, Fedora, RedHat, OpenSuse, etc.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @06:44PM (#230357)

          The problem isn't systemd. The problem is Canonical, Mint, Fedora, RedHat, OpenSuse, etc.

          The "good people" seem to be moving to Devuan or one of the BSDs, while the rest of the cattle are herded into the RedHat slaughterhouse.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:09PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:09PM (#230378)

            Hosting providers are not providing non-SystemD OSes (many third-party software only works on selected OSes). So many people need to work with one of the SystemD ones.

            SystemD is being forced. People are being molested to use it. And we still don't know how they plan to use it to control the population.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:00PM (#230370)

      Why is this one man being allowed to change Linux so it isn't Linux? Why can no one stop him? Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?

      Its propaganda. They are overcoming dissent by leading it. The "leaders" of the community who are opposing this SystemD, and this guy Larry Potter sit at the table at the end of the day recounting the day's activities and how they fooled and divided public opinion. In short, they are the same people.

      However, the positive side of SystemD is that the machine boots faster, something rarely done. So that is not a useful quality.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @07:07PM (#230375)

        However, the positive side of SystemD is that the machine boots faster, something rarely done. So that is not a useful quality.

        There's another "positive side" for the suits -- RHCE people can get better jobs diagnosing the completely unpredictable and illogical architecture of this ridiculous "system," and someday aspire a base income previously only known to the leaders in arcane proprietary spaghetti knowledge -- Oracle DBAs.

      • (Score: 1) by rleigh on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:53AM

        by rleigh (4887) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:53AM (#230724) Homepage

        In many cases, the "faster booting" is not true either. I've yet to see a system which boots faster with systemd, and from what I've read of others profiling more extensively, it's often only faster in minimal contrived situations.

        • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:41PM

          by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:41PM (#231770)

          My desktop boots a hell of a lot faster than it did with sysvinit so i'm happy

    • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday August 31 2015, @08:29PM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Monday August 31 2015, @08:29PM (#230432) Journal

      Why is the Linux community letting this one guy change the OS so radically that it's not Linux any longer?

      The distros allowed this all to happen. I've never been able to understand how they stood for the systemd requirement in Gnome! The entire open source community should have told them to stick that one right up their collective asses. That was totally malicious, and anyone who didn't see it as such shouldn't be surprised at the cluster fuck they're ending up with.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @10:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @10:23PM (#230488)

      Said Sun, HP-Ux, AIX (and Tannenbaum)... Why is this Finnish teenager redefining "unix" with this toy called "Linux"?

      Just sayin'

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Monday August 31 2015, @11:20PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Monday August 31 2015, @11:20PM (#230510)

        He didn't take existing UNIX and modify it until the original system could no longer function without his additions. He created his own system. (In fact, Linus has said that if BSD had succeeded in untangling itself from the Bell IP lawsuits earlier, he probably wouldn't have bothered making his own.)

        Fundamentally different.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:02AM

      by GDX (1950) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:02AM (#230617)

      Actually the biggest problem of systemd is Larry Potter himself, systemd as an idea is good but its implementation is really poor, Larry Potter is hindering it with poor communication, a bad implementation due to wanting to implementing a lot but don't actually paying attention to the implementation and a bad response to bug fixing requests or fixing the behavior and defaults as how they are already used in systems.

      • (Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:54PM

        by fnj (1654) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:54PM (#230890)

        This whole page is full of references to one "Larry Potter"? Is this some kind of inside joke? If so, it doesn't work. The guy's name is Lennart Poettering. If you are going to talk about somebody, please have the common decency and ordinary common sense to use his right name.

        • (Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:29PM

          by GDX (1950) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:29PM (#230994)

          Mea culpa, for cut an paste the name of the post that I replied... I need to pay more attention the next time.

          • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:26AM

            by fnj (1654) on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:26AM (#231127)

            It's OK; hardly your fault then. What I don't understand is that there are all kinds of posts on the page using that name. Would be nice to know who started it.

      • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:44PM

        by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:44PM (#231774)

        "systemd as an idea is good but its implementation is really poor" - thats a grand statement - what is your qualification for making it?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:09PM (#230422)

    Please. Where have all the distro programmers gone?

    Everyone likes systemd?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @01:10AM (#230572)

      If you want to save Linux, stop donating/supporting/helping Debhat, and help the Devuan team. Money talks, and starving off Debhat's cash flow will send a huge signal.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @08:13PM (#230425)

    Discussion on Poettering:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toVPMHRo8M [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:23AM (#230546)

      No one wants to watch a fucking narcissistic YouTube link.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:08AM (#230683)

      Never gonna give you up
      Never gonna let you down

  • (Score: 1) by crotherm on Monday August 31 2015, @09:56PM

    by crotherm (5427) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 31 2015, @09:56PM (#230473)

    I know this post will come off as yet "another old guy" lamenting the current path of Unix. Sure, su gives you the power to nuke a system. But it also gives a savvy admin a tool to do so much. It works. Early on I was told when writing utilities/tools that the mantra of "do one thing and do it well" was golden. Being able to craft a script using piped utilities was a must, but also an art. Having startup scripts and logs files text readable was a joy. Many things I disliked about MS operating systems are rearing their ugly heads in linux. Now if you can give me a security reason these changes are necessary, then I am willing to listen. But I am against changes that make up for a programmers or admin's deficiencies. Sure, provide languages that will do that, but allow others to have access to lower level tools/functions/libraries.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DarkMorph on Monday August 31 2015, @10:07PM

    by DarkMorph (674) on Monday August 31 2015, @10:07PM (#230481)
    Not long ago systemd vs classic init felt like vi vs emacs. Now look over the feedback here today on this article and find all the pro-systemd comments.

    It's completely different now. With each new version the hatred grows, and with good reason; for the reasons many here have already well stated, such as the violation of classic UNIX philosophy and so on. Initially I wanted to come and ask "umm, what about su -? Feels like a full login to me" but I think it's more important to fend this beast off and keep part of what has kept Linux going strong.

    This is a Wiki [without-systemd.org] with info about refraining from installing systemd chiefly by considering distros that come without systemd out of the box, including non-Linux operating systems such as BSD. This wiki had been mentioned in the past by another Soylentil on another article; credit goes to the unnamed.

    I also came across this site in my search. [systemd-free.org] I must give it an honourable mention as it is an attempt to preserve what was a relatively great binary Linux distro by keeping systemd out of it -- which sadly, decided to officially incorporate systemd by default. Some of you may remember the "scandal" when Arch did switch over -- on their forums there was allegedly a sign-up for those who wanted to continue to maintain the init scripts and any volunteers were promptly banned. That single heinous event reverted my recommendation of that distro, although their wiki and documentation remains excellent, helpful to users of all distros overall. That site mentions OpenRC which is a name too familiar with Gentoo users such as myself: it is the default for Gentoo and surely can be adopted to other distros.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by skullz on Monday August 31 2015, @10:34PM

    by skullz (2532) on Monday August 31 2015, @10:34PM (#230494)

    Can SystemD read and send email yet?

  • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:05AM

    by Subsentient (1111) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:05AM (#230537) Homepage Journal

    Su's job is simple. Change uid and gid to 0. What's so hard about that?

    Fucking Poettering.

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:23AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:23AM (#230547) Homepage

    systemd hate has reached a critical point; none of you guys seem to have even looked at the links to see what this even does.

    This patch is not intended to absorb su into systemd. Hell, this patch isn't even in systemd, but in machined, a VM management service.

    What this patch does is add a `machinectl shell` command which allows you to run a command as any other user ("su-like") on a VM that machined is managing. However, `machinectl shell` also works on the local machine, which makes it work similar to `su`. Here is what the documentation has to say on how `machinectl shell` is different from `su`:

    When using the shell command without arguments (thus invoking the executed shell or command on the local host) it is similar in many ways to a su(1) session, but unlike su completely isolates the new session from the originating session, so that it shares no process or session properties, and is in a clean and well-defined state. It will be tracked in a new utmp, login, audit, security and keyring session, and will not inherit any environment variables or resource limits, among other properties.

    In other words, it's like `su --login`, but is guaranteed to reset low-level parameters besides environment variables, no matter what version of `su` you're running (spoilers: there's more than one version of su) or how your system is set up.

    Also remember that this is primarily a VM command and not a `su` replacement. The fact that it works on the local host is due to code reuse.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by NCommander on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:30AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:30AM (#230632) Homepage Journal

      Then why is machinectl part of the default install?

      I don't do virtualization on my laptop, and on my desktop, I always do full system virtualization as I'm either running Windows, or testing kernel crap.

      --
      Still always moving
      • (Score: 1) by Eunuchswear on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:06PM

        by Eunuchswear (525) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:06PM (#230834) Journal

        Then why is machinectl part of the default install?

        Because it's ridiculously tiny. 260K or so.

        --
        Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
      • (Score: 1) by rtfazeberdee on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:49PM

        by rtfazeberdee (5847) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:49PM (#231777)

        speak to your distro about it. do you use every single binary on your current installation?

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by srobert on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:29AM

    by srobert (4803) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:29AM (#230631)

    Poettering has promised that systemd will not be absorbing any more of the standard unix utilities after this, and .... wait, this just in. We are receiving word that Systemd has invaded Poland, ladies and gentleman! I repeat, Systemd has invaded Poland!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:23AM (#230737)

      What is the Polan daemon used for?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:30PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:30PM (#230846)

        What is the Polan daemon used for?

        Practice for invading Netherlan?

        (you'd think that of all the countries Germany invaded in WW II, it would be easier to find some that end in 'd')