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The Linux Homefront Project reports on Lennart Poettering looking to do away with the good old "su" command. From the article, "With this pull request systemd now support a su command functional and can create privileged sessions, that are fully isolated from the original session. Su is a classic UNIX command and used more than 30 years. Why su is bad? Lennart Poettering says:"
Well, there have been long discussions about this, but the problem is that what su is supposed to do is very unclear. On one hand it’s supposed to open a new session and change a number of execution context parameters (uid, gid, env, …), and on the other it’s supposed to inherit a lot concepts from the originating session (tty, cgroup, audit, …). Since this is so weakly defined it’s a really weird mix&match of old and new paramters. To keep this somewhat managable we decided to only switch the absolute minimum over, and that excludes XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, specifically because XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is actually bound to the session/audit runtime and those we do not transition. Instead we simply unset it.
Long story short: su is really a broken concept. It will given you kind of a shell, and it’s fine to use it for that, but it’s not a full login, and shouldn’t be mistaken for one.
I'm guessing that Devuan won't be getting rid of "su."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Michelle on Monday August 31 2015, @08:09PM
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?"