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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: 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.

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  • (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