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Lennart Poettering Has Merged “su” Command Replacement into systemd

posted by martyb on Monday August 31 2015, @04:29PM   
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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Original Submission

• Re:Systemd Just Doesn't Smell Right to Me(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.

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