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Lennart Poettering Has Merged “su” Command Replacement into systemd

posted by martyb on Monday August 31 2015, @04:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-su-me dept.

CoolHand writes:

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: 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.

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  • (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) 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.