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