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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:''a new OS being developed''Re:''a new OS being developed'' (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:45AM

  by M. Baranczak (1673) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @03:45AM (#230638)

  http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Free.2FOpen_Source_Operating_systems_without_systemd_in_the_default_installation [without-systemd.org] Devuan won't be ready for a while, if ever. Slackware sounds too user-hostile for my needs. I used Gentoo for a while, and it worked pretty well, but that was years ago. I've never even heard of any of the other ones on that list. Anybody have recommendations?

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  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:''a new OS being developed''(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38AM

  by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <{axehandle} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38AM (#230679)

  http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Free.2FOpen_Source_Operating_systems_without_systemd_in_the_default_installation [without-systemd.org] ... I've never even heard of any of the other ones on that list. Anybody have recommendations?

  PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com] is worth a look. And the Slackware derivative Salix [salixos.org]*, a (somewhat) simplified Slack with an easy to use package manager that looks after dependancies.

  *Warning: I went to Salix when I dropped OpenSuse and stayed with it for a couple of weeks before moving on to Slackware; the same could happen to you.

  --
  It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.

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• A disto from the without-systemd list(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM (#230734)

  Devuan

  If you were happy with Debian before Lennart, try antiX (pronounced "Antiques").
  It's based on Debian Testing but has avoided Lennart's junk.
  They recently had a new release. [freeforums.org]

  They have several spins and as long as you have 64MB of RAM and a blank 700MB CD-R (or a thumbdrive), you should be golden.
  If your box has some modern oomph, this will make it like a 427 AC Cobra.

  -- gewg_

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