On 29/08/2015 14:43, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
> 'su' is not a concept, it's a program.

<grumble> Okay, let's clarify.
A program is the implementation of an idea. The idea is often
unwritten or unspoken, or forgotten, and people will only refer
to the implementation; but good design always starts with the idea,
the concept, of what the program is supposed to do.

When Lennart says "su is a broken concept", he's saying "the
concept behind the su program is not clear or well-defined, and
it was not a good idea to implement it"; and I agree with that.
(Then he naturally branches onto his NIH obsession and decides
that UNIX is bad and systemd must reinvent everything, which I
obviously disagree with.)

As you're saying, the correct design is to separate the tasks
that the su program accomplishes, if one doesn't need a full-
environment root shell.
But if a full-environment root shell is needed, logging in as
root works. That's exactly what the "login" _concept_ is.


> Now, is
>

> 1. Build systems suck and git isn't exactly the greatest tool on the
>     planet for working with more than one source tree, so lets add the
>     code we want to write to systemd

>
> 2. goto 1
>
> a concept?

Of course it is! I'm surprised systemd-versioncontrol isn't a thing yet. XD

--
Laurent