Systemd's latest conquest: the 'su' command

itwire.com

16 points·mariuz··11 comments

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Just because something has a de facto rather than de jure specification does not make it unspecified.

> death of innovation for all functions absorbed into systemd

Not sure there was much innovation in 'su'...

> might come to the point where one has just systemd and the kernel making up a Linux distribution

I think that's kinda what they are going for...

Well, Ubuntu introduced a major usability change when it appeared.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141715

And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140690

If the behavior was never fully specified (as claimed), then it might be worth having this just to see what it breaks and what bugs it uncovers.

What it boils down to is that as long as you stick to users and groups, su works just fine.

But systemd is using cgroups and pam to do session tracking, and using su within that seems to break some elements of their tracking (or some concept within it).

Thing here is that su is doing the job it has always done, so frankly it is the systemd session tracking code that is in the wrong.

... as long as it is not abused. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10162451

And again the issue is PAM, not SU...

True, but for most of us there's more than just groups and users. su is helpful to add other users' privileges to the current session, but there was no command to create a new full, isolated session other than logging in on a different tty or ssh'ing to localhost.

`machinectl shell` now implement that feature, with the added bonus of being transparently able to log into a local container (or possibly even virtual machines).

Not sure why it says "Linux/UNIX".

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