Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Cindy-Sue Causey]

On 9/4/15, do...@mail.com  wrote:
> On 08/30/2015 17:49:31,Doug wrote:
>> On 08/30/2015 03:33 PM, T.J. Duchene wrote:
>> > I know this because I have actually built 95% of base Linux from
>> > source by hand - multiple times  -  over the last 17 years. In my
>> > opinion, if you don't want to take the effort to do the work, then
>> > you simply have to accept other's decisions regarding what they
>> > compiled in.
>> >
>> >
>> /snip/
>>
>> That's easy for you to say, since you are obviously a programmer. The
>> rest of us may never have programmed anything, and C just looks like
>> some foreign language --which it is! What we would like is stability,
>> and until Poettering started messing with Linux, we pretty much had
>> it--at least in any given distro.
>
> Don't fret, I program in C and I'm only running funtoo and I'm already
> way over my head. I don't mind having to read the manual or compile
> things, it's the bugs, I must have a collection of at least 100 and the
> devs want all non mission critical ones reported upstream. I've
> tried to report 6 and most of the time I can't reach them or they don't
> respond. I've gotten 1 reply, and I've decided to help him with his
> project, menumaker.
> In short, there is no way you could have enough time to maintain your
> own system that you create from scratch unless you have a serious
> amount of education, time, and working config files. Even then it would
> be a nightmare.
>


Had to catch myself and NOT create noise by asking David how he
learned some of these out there things I've just seen in the last few
emails. Smacked myself in the head (no, really, it hurt) because a lot
of what we know is simply about how involved we each are with our user
specific installs.

If our usage of Debian primarily involves opening a few .iso, .deb,
whatever and installing then off to the rest of Life outside Debian,
exposure is minimal as will then be the need to stop and spend time
learning something new about Debian's inner intricacies. If we're the
type to ceaselessly poke around under the hood and thus inevitably
break things in the process, the need to self-teach the inner workings
of Debian rises exponentially... as then does one's knowledge that
can hopefully next be shared on lists like Debian-User..

Internet search engines have proved to basically 99.9% of the time
come through with answers for me when I do inevitably break my
Debians. Beyond the user generated errors behind this keyboard, the
transitions related glitches recently were pretty much a known Sid
unstable given. Just took user patience to get through it. In fact
there were more uninstallables I never commented about last few days
(libavfilter-ffmpeg5). Those will be (magically) fixed as soon as the
latest updates are finished installing here, approximately 2 days
after the issue showed up.

Back to the search engines, I used to spend A LOT of EXTREMELY
FRUSTRATED time wading through unnecessary information trying to find
answers years ago. I started entering search engine queries as the
exact questions I had, meaning as full *sentences*, and I swear that
finally helped refine the searches.

More relevant information now bubbles to the top, front page of those
searches than ever used to happen. Prior to that, I can remember
having to dig onto Page 2, Page 3, or worse to find something
appropriate. I don't know if the difference today is that the quality
of websites favored by search engines have changed or if asking fully
worded questions any other user might ask has helped after all these
years, but there you go.

Cindy :)

-- 
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA

* runs... back outside because she's not done with daily chores yet... *

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[David Wright]

Quoting Andrew McGlashan (andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au):
> 
> 
> On 1/09/2015 11:08 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> >> > west!david 12:22:14 ~ $ diff -U0 VC-login-*[ey]
> >> > --- VC-login-jessie 2015-08-31 11:34:23.476573261 -0500
> >> > +++ VC-login-wheezy 2015-08-31 11:38:11.0 -0500
> > How did you get these files? I haven't been able to come up with a way
> > to get a dump of the exact text that is on a console, short of manually
> > typing it into an editor (probably on another computer, for
> > convenience's sake). Parts of it are logged, but not as far as I can
> > tell into a single file, and I would actively expect that the text I'm
> > objecting to would get logged separately (if at all) in any case.
> 
> conspy perhaps ?

That is a very neat tool that I hadn't come across. It works over ssh,
and cut-and-paste works well. Presumably you can avoid c by running
it inside a script command.

But the limitation that affects me*, compared with using gpm to
c from the original console, is that you can't run it until you can
access the computer remotely, by which time some information that I
would want to capture has scrolled off the screen out of conspy's grasp.

*My use case is normally capturing messages produced at boot up, most
of which have scrolled off the screen by the time you want to capture
them. This is why I posted
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/09/msg00038.html

Cheers,
David.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Curt]

On 2015-09-02, Nicolas George  wrote:
>
> For me, Ctrl-AltGr-) gives ^] as expected, both with XTerm and the
> Linux console.

Me too. 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[David Wright]

Quoting Seeker (seeker5...@comcast.net):

> Some of this may have to be revisited later once more people actually
> use it and have that first hand exposure to what works and what doesn't.
...
> There is an argument for an easier key combination, but how do you
> make it more accessible for people who can't hold down a key
> combination long enough for the repeat to kick in?

telnet -e sets the escape key you want to use.

In the short term, you can redefine an infrequently-used key to send
the appropriate code, eg through /etc/console-setup/remap.inc,
because it seems more likely that you'll get stuck in a session on a
(possibly sole) VC than on X.

Cheers,
David.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Eike Lantzsch]

On Thursday 03 September 2015 19:35:08 Nicolas George wrote:
> Le septidi 17 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Eike Lantzsch a écrit :
> > Not me
> > The Ctrl-AltGr level is not populated in my keyboard map.
> 
> It does not necessarily needs to.
> 
> > Interesting things which I discovered with the trials:
> > Typing Ctrl-- reduces the console fontsize in konsole (KDE) and typing
> > Ctrl-+ magnifies the console fontsize.
> 
> So you tested with konsole? Did you test with the Linux console and XTerm?
> Missing features in whizzbang tools would not be surprising.
> 
> Regards,
Results with Linux console, xterm  and with whizzbang tool are absolutely the 
same in this respect.

Kind regards
E.L.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Nicolas George]

Le septidi 17 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Eike Lantzsch a écrit :
> Not me
> The Ctrl-AltGr level is not populated in my keyboard map.

It does not necessarily needs to.

> Interesting things which I discovered with the trials:
> Typing Ctrl-- reduces the console fontsize in konsole (KDE) and typing Ctrl-+ 
> magnifies the console fontsize.

So you tested with konsole? Did you test with the Linux console and XTerm?
Missing features in whizzbang tools would not be surprising.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Eike Lantzsch]

On Thursday 03 September 2015 15:09:12 Curt wrote:
> On 2015-09-02, Nicolas George  wrote:
> > For me, Ctrl-AltGr-) gives ^] as expected, both with XTerm and the
> > Linux console.
> 
> Me too.
Not me
The Ctrl-AltGr level is not populated in my keyboard map.
Intl-keyboard with German layout and dead keys.

Switching to US-layout results in
Ctrl-AltGr-]   9
Ctrl-AltGr-[   BACKSPACE, not 8
Ctrl-AltGr-=   0
This is the same as using the Ctrl-key without the additional AltGr.

Latinamerican layout on the same keyboard has the same result (nil) as the 
German layout.

Go figure ...

Interesting things which I discovered with the trials:
Typing Ctrl-- reduces the console fontsize in konsole (KDE) and typing Ctrl-+ 
magnifies the console fontsize.
It is the same no matter if using German layout or US layout.

Cheers
Eike

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[David Wright]

Quoting Eike Lantzsch (zp6...@gmx.net):
> On Thursday 03 September 2015 15:09:12 Curt wrote:
> > On 2015-09-02, Nicolas George  wrote:
> > > For me, Ctrl-AltGr-) gives ^] as expected, both with XTerm and the
> > > Linux console.
> > 
> > Me too.
> Not me
> The Ctrl-AltGr level is not populated in my keyboard map.
> Intl-keyboard with German layout and dead keys.

If you want to find out where ^] has gone to on the console, you can
type:
dumpkeys -f | grep -i control_bracketright
The (very long) lines that match will start with:
keycode  =  ...
where N is the number of the key if you wish to redefine it or add to
its definition, and X is the unshifted key which will normally
correspond to the engraving on that key.

> Switching to US-layout results in
> Ctrl-AltGr-]   9
> Ctrl-AltGr-[   BACKSPACE, not 8
> Ctrl-AltGr-=   0
> This is the same as using the Ctrl-key without the additional AltGr.
> 
> Latinamerican layout on the same keyboard has the same result (nil) as the 
> German layout.

What are you using as a prefix for these keystrokes?

> Go figure ...
> 
> Interesting things which I discovered with the trials:
> Typing Ctrl-- reduces the console fontsize in konsole (KDE) and typing Ctrl-+ 
> magnifies the console fontsize.
> It is the same no matter if using German layout or US layout.

Fair enough. I see the same effect in iceweasel; very useful, but not
much to do with escaping from machinectl.

Cheers,
David.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Curt]

On 2015-09-03, David Wright  wrote:
>> 
>> Interesting things which I discovered with the trials:
>> Typing Ctrl-- reduces the console fontsize in konsole (KDE) and typing 
>> Ctrl-+ 
>> magnifies the console fontsize.
>> It is the same no matter if using German layout or US layout.
>
> Fair enough. I see the same effect in iceweasel; very useful, but not
> much to do with escaping from machinectl.

I knew about that one in a browser (helpful when confronted with a tiny 
font--goes
without saying, I guess).

> Cheers,
> David.
>

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Thursday 03 September 2015 06:45:55 Seeker wrote:
> On 9/2/2015 3:25 AM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > On Wednesday 02 September 2015 09:09:45 Seeker wrote:
> >> Unless you have set keyboard settings somewhere to have an excessively
> >> slow repeat,
> >> as opposed to a longer delay before the repeat kicks in, theoretically
> >> it should not be
> >> that hard to get 3 ^]s in 1 second.
> >>
> >> Or am I interpreting something incorrectly?
> >
> > Yes, you are.  You are ignoring the part that said "disabled".
> >
> > Lisi
>
> Not ignoring, just questioning the need.

Maybe one day you'll be (relevantly) disabled.  Then you'll see the problem.

Lisi
>
> *If* like people are saying you can type 'exit' or hit 'Ctrl'+'D' to
> exit then there are more
> familiar and on easier way to exit.
>
> Some of this may have to be revisited later once more people actually
> use it and have
> that first hand exposure to what works and what doesn't.
>
> Maybe ^] was added as an additional exit method because Lennart uses
> other stuff that
> accepts that to exit and thought it would be nice for people who use
> that method to be
> able to exit the shell session the same way.
>
>   If ^] is an emergency exit, that would assume it will work when you
> can't type 'exit' and
> 'Ctrl'+'D' doesn't work either. If it isn't, why would you need ^] 3
> times in a second.
> If it is going to work when 'exit' and 'Ctrl'+'D' don't, it would need
> to intercept the key
> presses and decide whether to act on them or pass the to whatever is
> running inside the
> shell. If you intend those key presses to go to the program running in
> the shell you don't
> want the shell to act on it on the first key press and exit when what
> you really wanted was
> to exit the program running inside the shell. Same thing with any other
> key combination,
> you don't want the shell to exit if what you really wanted was for
> something to happen
> inside the shell.
>
> There is an argument for an easier key combination, but how do you make
> it more
> accessible for people who can't hold down a key combination long enough
> for the repeat
> to kick in?
>
> Later, Seeker

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Seeker]

On 9/2/2015 3:23 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 01:09:45 -0700
Seeker  wrote:

  > >> To exit the shell created with "machinectl shell", you are instructed

"Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session." That is very
unfriendly for disabled. Not all can hit any key in 1 second. To
specify two keys is even harder. There has never been mention of any
other method to exit this new shell command.

It is also very US centric, because on non US keybaord that combination
can be difficult to press (eg on french keyboard).

I looked up the French keyboard layout.
Granted I never had a reason to seek it out, but I have not seen anyone
complain about
'Ctrl'+'Alt'+'Del' being difficult to press.
Compared to that 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+')' to get ^] does not seem any more
difficult.

Except that on my AZERTY keyboard 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+')' gets me nothing at all.

To get "]" I have to press "AltGr" + ")", which may explain why "Ctrl" + "AltGr" + 
")"  gives nothing.
  
  
Cheers,
  
Ron.

I guess that's another US thing, maybe other countries too.

The keyboard image I found on the internet was interactive and it just 
happened to be the 'Alt Gr'

key I was mousing over. I did learn some things. :-)

Even though the right 'Alt' normally gives the same scan code as 'Alt 
GR' it isn't usually labeled
that way so in the US we more commonly just see two different keys 
labeled as 'Alt'. And things
normally work the same way with either one. I only found this out when I 
was looking for the

layout for the French keyboard layout.

Also there was some indication that US laptops with smaller keyboards 
may cheat and give the

left 'Alt' scan code when you hit the 'Alt' key on the right.=-O

Later, Seeker

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Andrew McGlashan]

On 2/09/2015 12:11 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
> Which, I am afraid, puts you in the pattern of those who defend the
> approach the cabal has taken.
> 
> (Concerning the use of "cabal":
> 
> http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html
> 
> Although I'm not really sure they understood what their own choice of
> words seemed to imply.)

It's not exactly secret, but many are blinded to these facts and the
implications.

In AU, we recently had a law passed over metadata; it was framed in such
a way that it was simple to *include* an otherwise excluded body from
seeking access -- border protection were made law enforcement.  That was
sneaky and political, it was secret, it was done in stealth; we can
expect more of the same with systemd as evidenced by Lennart's
referenced posting.

Cheers
A.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Andrew McGlashan]

On 1/09/2015 3:08 AM, pecon...@mesanetworks.net wrote:
> If you want to exit the shell normally, typically the 'exit' command
> will suffice (it depends on your shell, obviously).

And if, for some reason, you can't exit a shell normally; but you can
login again in a different session, then you can kill the errant session
from the new login.

A.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Andrew McGlashan]

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Hash: SHA256

On 31/08/2015 10:33 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> Agreed. For what it's worth, I don't think this particular
> iteration of the discussion has gotten nearly as heated or as
> hostile or as harmful as many of the previous ones have done.

Perhaps it is simply because those that are against systemd on the
whole have had enough of beating their head against a brick wall.  It
doesn't mean that the problems themselves have gone away.

And as I've said before, having a non pro-systemd view is a recipe to
be called a troll and worse; irrespective of any actual facts.

I'm sure many have taken up Gentoo and/or a flavour of BSD ... if they
can; others will do so later when they must.

Kind Regards
AndrewM

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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Andrew McGlashan]

On 1/09/2015 11:08 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
>> > west!david 12:22:14 ~ $ diff -U0 VC-login-*[ey]
>> > --- VC-login-jessie 2015-08-31 11:34:23.476573261 -0500
>> > +++ VC-login-wheezy 2015-08-31 11:38:11.0 -0500
> How did you get these files? I haven't been able to come up with a way
> to get a dump of the exact text that is on a console, short of manually
> typing it into an editor (probably on another computer, for
> convenience's sake). Parts of it are logged, but not as far as I can
> tell into a single file, and I would actively expect that the text I'm
> objecting to would get logged separately (if at all) in any case.

conspy perhaps ?


# aptitude show conspy
Thursday 3 September 19:02:30 AEST 2015 -- show conspy
Package: conspy
State: not installed
Version: 1.8-2
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Maintainer: Russell Stuart 
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 67.6 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5), libncurses5 (>= 5.5-5~), libtinfo5
Description: Remote control of Linux virtual consoles
 Conspy allows a (possibly remote) user to see what is displayed on a
Linux virtual console, and send keystrokes to it.  It is rather like
VNC, but where VNC takes control of a GUI
 conspy takes control of a text mode virtual console.  Unlike VNC,
conspy does not require a server to be installed prior to being used.
Homepage: http://www.stuart.id.au/russell/files/conspy/


Cheers
A.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 3:57 AM, Andrew McGlashan <
andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:

> On 1/09/2015 3:08 AM, pecon...@mesanetworks.net wrote:
> > If you want to exit the shell normally, typically the 'exit' command
> > will suffice (it depends on your shell, obviously).
>
> And if, for some reason, you can't exit a shell normally; but you can
> login again in a different session, then you can kill the errant session
> from the new login.
>

You don't even need to use a new login to do that in most cases.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[doark]

On 08/30/2015 17:49:31,Doug wrote:
> On 08/30/2015 03:33 PM, T.J. Duchene wrote:
> > I know this because I have actually built 95% of base Linux from
> > source by hand - multiple times  -  over the last 17 years. In my
> > opinion, if you don't want to take the effort to do the work, then
> > you simply have to accept other's decisions regarding what they
> > compiled in.
> >
> >  
> /snip/
> 
> That's easy for you to say, since you are obviously a programmer. The
> rest of us may never have programmed anything, and C just looks like
> some foreign language --which it is! What we would like is stability,
> and until Poettering started messing with Linux, we pretty much had
> it--at least in any given distro.

Don't fret, I program in C and I'm only running funtoo and I'm already
way over my head. I don't mind having to read the manual or compile
things, it's the bugs, I must have a collection of at least 100 and the
devs want all non mission critical ones reported upstream. I've
tried to report 6 and most of the time I can't reach them or they don't
respond. I've gotten 1 reply, and I've decided to help him with his
project, menumaker.
In short, there is no way you could have enough time to maintain your
own system that you create from scratch unless you have a serious
amount of education, time, and working config files. Even then it would
be a nightmare.


On 09/01/2015 2015 23:11:51, Joel Rees wrote:
> The issue is not whether they should be leading their projects or not,
> the issue is whether what they build is really appropriate for
> becoming a necessary part of all major distributions of Linux kernel
> OSses.

This is where Lennart goes wrong, you see, sysvinit was, and still is,
AFAIK, easily replaced with another tool. Unlike Linus, Lennart is more
brutal with his software's design such that it is extremely difficult
to replace parts or the whole of it. He also does not let himself be
proven wrong, as it says you can do in the linux kernel mailing list
FAQ.
I keep hoping he'll learn...
You don't have to take my word for it, there have been bug reports
which have not been fixed because the systemd team does not want them
fixed. You want evidence perhaps? I don't have a link on me but there
is the trouble with an encryption package that was ignored, and there
is the issue with you having to reboot every time you attach "new
hardware" which means that I had to reboot my machine every time I
(re)attached my USB to SATA adapter, but not a USB flash
drive, which is really strange. I would have to enter my password
and go into my BIOS to check that the card was properly attached. And
then I must be careful not to bump the adapter. Who cares if the system
boots faster if I have to reboot all the time?
I just wish Lennart was more gentle and benevolent. As opposed to
saying the the future is systemd (I think that was a literal quote,
though it may have been the conclusion I drew after I read all his
writings on the subject.)
Incidentally, he only considers three init systems out of all the
possibilities during his review, systemd, upstart, and sysvinit. We all
know which would win given that comparison.


> If you will excuse me, that's not our decision to make. 
> 
> FOSS is not about making everyone happy or whether something is
> "really appropriate". It is about empowering you to make your own
> decisions. Should you desire, you have the ability to fork code, and
> part company with the herd.
> 
> Distributors have every right to build their Linux as they see fit.
> You have the right to reject that and build your own. That's your
>
> freedom, and that is all that was ever promised - nothing more. 
> If you ask me, Linux users are far too dependent on binary
> distributions to start with.  They fill a need for those who have time
> constraints, but that's all.  You are willingly allowing others to
> make decisions for you, in return for using the fruits of their labor.
> As such, IMHO, binary distro users have no standing to complain. 


That's a rather cold view, even if is is the FOSS view, people depend on
others to make good decisions, and yes, we do have a right to question
their decisions, that's how people learn about what is a good one and
what is not, then they can make better ones. It was one of the
recommendations of St. Paul, "Question all things, retain that which is
true." 1 Thessalonians 5:21. If a faith based religious leader can
recommend that, surely we who are (think we are), more into the
scientific method can also.
As systemd makes both testing and changing much harder, I think you can
understand why it's a poor choice. This is not an opinion, try to get
your system free of systemd, may are the posts I've read where the devs
say that it is impossible. And, as systemd continues to take on the
functionality and often times in place of what used to be modular
software, I think you can see how something that's free is not
necessary something that's what you need. If I sent the 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Seeker]

On 8/31/2015 12:45 PM, Erwan David wrote:

Le 31/08/2015 20:53, Charlie Kravetz a écrit :

To exit the shell created with "machinectl shell", you are instructed
"Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session." That is very
unfriendly for disabled. Not all can hit any key in 1 second. To
specify two keys is even harder. There has never been mention of any
other method to exit this new shell command.


It is also very US centric, because on non US keybaord that combination
can be difficult to press (eg on french keyboard).



I looked up the French keyboard layout.

Granted I never had a reason to seek it out, but I have not seen anyone 
complain about

'Ctrl'+'Alt'+'Del' being difficult to press.

Compared to that 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+')' to get ^] does not seem any more 
difficult.


Unless you have set keyboard settings somewhere to have an excessively 
slow repeat,
as opposed to a longer delay before the repeat kicks in, theoretically 
it should not be

that hard to get 3 ^]s in 1 second.

Or am I interpreting something incorrectly?

It's been indicated elsewhere that the normal methods of exiting a shell 
session will work

for this too and ^] is more of an emergency exit.

Later, Seeker

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-09-02 at 11:07, Joel Rees wrote:

> Steve mentioned (off-list, was it?) that an OS without systemd is 
> (relatively speaking) not that hard to switch a new init under,
> where an OS with systemd is significantly more difficult.

I don't remember that post, and I'm not even sure which Steve you're
talking about, but if it was public (just not on this list) I'd be
interested in seeing it.

That's been my position and my concern since the idea of switching
Debian over to systemd was first raised, and when I brought it up on
debian-devel in what I think was the first real wave of discussions
there, I recall it as having been more or less dismissed as being
somewhere between "not true" and "irrelevant"; I don't recall having
seen anyone else even raise that concern, much less treat it as a
noteworthy consideration, then or since.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 4:54 AM, T. J. Duchene  wrote:
> Sorry had an issue that caused a premature post before I could
> finish it.

Happens to all of us every now and then, I think.

> On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 23:11:51 +0900
> Joel Rees  wrote:
>
>> There is a difference between what I asked and what you're telling me.

And it remains so.

>> Simply tweaking and recompiling debian or redhat is not what I'm
>> asking about, although it can be tedious enough. Nor is building a
>> functioning gentoo really.

Please re-read that.

>> I'm asking if you have built an OS from scratch, including the
>> userland tools and apps, for a specific, non-trivial purpose.

And that.

> That depends.

Only if you can convince me to back off the bar you say I set too high.

I didn't set the bar. The people who say, "Compile it yourself if you
don't like it our way!" are they who set that bar. I'm not the one who
could have lowered that bar by putting systemd in a parallel
distribution.

>  If you consider using LFS to be the only answer you will
> accept, then "No", since as I said, I have never used it.

Well, LFS is not the only option, but it's the easiest of the options
I see for "compiling it myself" relative to the current discussion.
Everything else requires more experience, skill, and time.

Steve mentioned (off-list, was it?) that an OS without systemd is
(relatively speaking) not that hard to switch a new init under, where
an OS with systemd is significantly more difficult. Perhaps thinking
about that should point you in the direction I'm thinking.

> If you
> consider that I have taken existing code, compiled, rearranged, or
> added to it to save time, then the answer might be "Yes."
>
> It really depends on if you accept that I have rebuilt most of Linux
> over multiple occasions, but never all at once.

As I say. this is not about your CV. It's about whether you understand
what "compile it yourself" means in this case.

> I suspect that anyone who has done so is a tiny minority on this list.

Not as few as you think, I'd say, but the relative minority numbers
are really rather to the point that "compile it yourself" is not an
argument in favor of systemd. Quite the opposite.

> I do not think that it is fair to judge what a person is saying based
> on that.

Once again, I am not talking about anyone's CV.

>[...]

And so you repeat a bunch of that self-styled cabal's talking points.
I let you waste my time that direction last night. I've got to get
some sleep tonight.

But,

 Build it yourself!

you say. Sure. Simple.

But cleaning out the bits and pieces of systemd api from various
packages takes time. Even if most of the packages have compile-time
switches, there is a lot of recompiling, and the current state of the
debian community does not allow for the community to do much testing
of the results. That means, really, that the DIYer has quite a bit of
regression tests to build, in addition to tweaking the build variables
and getting the compiles started on whatever passes as his or her
build farm.

The partial replacement for su that started this thread is a case in
point. Every package that uses it will be rather intimately tied to
systemd, and I, if I were to build a completely systemd-free debian,
would have to re-write parts of those packages, hunt for or write
replacements for some packages, and write new regression testing for
the results.

In addition to the tweaking, re-writing, collecting alternative tools,
etc., it would mean for me, several days, minimum, of down time during
the build process, since my build environment is my workstation, and
my CPUs are not fast enough to allow me to compile and do certain
parts of my regular work at the same time.

Working from Debian sources is going to take more regression testing
than going through an LFS recipe. If I go the LFS route, using
binaries from debian or fedora would be inviting coredumps. Using
source, less so, but then I end up re-compiling more non-OS apps.

Even working from Debian sources, stripping out systemd means subtly
altering the APIs and ABIs, inviting subtle bugs. Subtle bugs tend to
be the most dangerous.

Going one's own way on something like this essentially means
abandoning the community. And because of the amount of work required,
you end up needing to start your own community. So compiling it
yourself in this case requires more than technical skill and a little
extra time. It requires a charismatic leader to start a new community,
too.

"Build it yourself." is only a whitewashed version of "Don't let the
door hit you on your way out."

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ric Moore]

On 09/02/2015 10:27 AM, Joel Rees wrote:

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Ric Moore  wrote:

On 09/01/2015 10:27 PM, Joel Rees wrote:


2015/09/02 1:04 "Ric Moore" >:
  >
  > On 08/31/2015 11:36 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
  >
  >> One, I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or
respect
  >> in practice for" those things.
  >
  >
  > How would that be different from "he does seem to prefer underage
girls"? :0 Ric

Are you really trying to induce or project a sexual orientation slur
into the conversation?



Just pointing out the innuendo. :) Ric


To which I have to say, either you're inventing an innuendo that
wasn't there,


You stated "I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or
respect in practice for" those things.

Since your point cannot be proven, it is innuendo. By that logic he 
could "seem" to be guilty of all sorts of things. I agree that 
Poettering, et al, have had numerous complaints against them, in the 
past. But even Linus has been referred to as hard to deal with. So, 
there is a balancing act between the pursuit of the "Right Thing(tm)" 
and the sensibilities of users, especially with regards to code. With 
regards to "su" he does seem to have a point though. :) Ric



--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Doug]

On 09/02/2015 10:54 PM, The Wanderer wrote:

On 2015-09-02 at 20:15, Ric Moore wrote:


On 09/02/2015 10:27 AM, Joel Rees wrote:


On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Ric Moore 
wrote:



Just pointing out the innuendo. :) Ric




I think you're all all wet! Innuendo is Italian for enema.

--doug

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Seeker]

On 9/2/2015 3:25 AM, Lisi Reisz wrote:

On Wednesday 02 September 2015 09:09:45 Seeker wrote:

Unless you have set keyboard settings somewhere to have an excessively
slow repeat,
as opposed to a longer delay before the repeat kicks in, theoretically
it should not be
that hard to get 3 ^]s in 1 second.

Or am I interpreting something incorrectly?

Yes, you are.  You are ignoring the part that said "disabled".

Lisi


Not ignoring, just questioning the need.

*If* like people are saying you can type 'exit' or hit 'Ctrl'+'D' to 
exit then there are more

familiar and on easier way to exit.

Some of this may have to be revisited later once more people actually 
use it and have

that first hand exposure to what works and what doesn't.

Maybe ^] was added as an additional exit method because Lennart uses 
other stuff that
accepts that to exit and thought it would be nice for people who use 
that method to be

able to exit the shell session the same way.

 If ^] is an emergency exit, that would assume it will work when you 
can't type 'exit' and
'Ctrl'+'D' doesn't work either. If it isn't, why would you need ^] 3 
times in a second.
If it is going to work when 'exit' and 'Ctrl'+'D' don't, it would need 
to intercept the key
presses and decide whether to act on them or pass the to whatever is 
running inside the
shell. If you intend those key presses to go to the program running in 
the shell you don't
want the shell to act on it on the first key press and exit when what 
you really wanted was
to exit the program running inside the shell. Same thing with any other 
key combination,
you don't want the shell to exit if what you really wanted was for 
something to happen

inside the shell.

There is an argument for an easier key combination, but how do you make 
it more
accessible for people who can't hold down a key combination long enough 
for the repeat

to kick in?

Later, Seeker

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-09-02 at 20:15, Ric Moore wrote:

> On 09/02/2015 10:27 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Ric Moore 
>> wrote:

>>> Just pointing out the innuendo. :) Ric
>> 
>> To which I have to say, either you're inventing an innuendo that 
>> wasn't there,

I think he may have meant "insinuation", or something like that - an
attempt to imply something as true without outright stating it as true.
Not quite sure how to parse it out even with that in mind, but I do
think I know roughly what he was getting at; I just don't think the
claim deserves the dignity of a response, and I doubt that responding to
it would do anything but fan flames.

> You stated "I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy
> or respect in practice for" those things.

No, he didn't; I did.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ron]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 01:09:45 -0700
Seeker  wrote:

 > >> To exit the shell created with "machinectl shell", you are instructed
> >> "Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session." That is very
> >> unfriendly for disabled. Not all can hit any key in 1 second. To
> >> specify two keys is even harder. There has never been mention of any
> >> other method to exit this new shell command.  

> > It is also very US centric, because on non US keybaord that combination
> > can be difficult to press (eg on french keyboard).  

> I looked up the French keyboard layout.
> Granted I never had a reason to seek it out, but I have not seen anyone 
> complain about
> 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+'Del' being difficult to press.
> Compared to that 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+')' to get ^] does not seem any more 
> difficult.  

Except that on my AZERTY keyboard 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+')' gets me nothing at all.

To get "]" I have to press "AltGr" + ")", which may explain why "Ctrl" + 
"AltGr" + ")"  gives nothing.
 
 
Cheers,
 
Ron.
-- 
   Never call a man a fool.
   Borrow from him.

   -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --
 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ric Moore]

On 09/01/2015 10:27 PM, Joel Rees wrote:

2015/09/02 1:04 "Ric Moore" >:
 >
 > On 08/31/2015 11:36 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
 >
 >> One, I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or respect
 >> in practice for" those things.
 >
 >
 > How would that be different from "he does seem to prefer underage
girls"? :0 Ric

Are you really trying to induce or project a sexual orientation slur
into the conversation?



Just pointing out the innuendo. :) Ric


--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Wednesday 02 September 2015 09:09:45 Seeker wrote:
> Unless you have set keyboard settings somewhere to have an excessively
> slow repeat,
> as opposed to a longer delay before the repeat kicks in, theoretically
> it should not be
> that hard to get 3 ^]s in 1 second.
>
> Or am I interpreting something incorrectly?

Yes, you are.  You are ignoring the part that said "disabled".

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Nicolas George]

Le sextidi 16 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Renaud OLGIATI a écrit :
> Except that on my AZERTY keyboard 'Ctrl'+'Alt'+')' gets me nothing at all.
> 
> To get "]" I have to press "AltGr" + ")", which may explain why "Ctrl" + 
> "AltGr" + ")"  gives nothing.

For me, Ctrl-AltGr-) gives ^] = 0x1D as expected, both with XTerm and the
Linux console.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Ric Moore  wrote:
> On 09/01/2015 10:27 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
>>
>> 2015/09/02 1:04 "Ric Moore" > >:
>>  >
>>  > On 08/31/2015 11:36 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
>>  >
>>  >> One, I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or
>> respect
>>  >> in practice for" those things.
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > How would that be different from "he does seem to prefer underage
>> girls"? :0 Ric
>>
>> Are you really trying to induce or project a sexual orientation slur
>> into the conversation?
>>
>
> Just pointing out the innuendo. :) Ric

To which I have to say, either you're inventing an innuendo that
wasn't there, or you are equating antisocial engineering conduct to an
interest in unequal sexual relationships.

There are parallels and analogies and metaphors, but do you really
intend to invoke them?

It's a two-edged sword. Without certain disclaimers, it would be you
making the innuendos, any way around it.

> --
> My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
> "There are two Great Sins in the world...
> ..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
> Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
> http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html
>

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[T.J. Duchene]

On 09/01/2015 09:11 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
I'm asking if you have built an OS from scratch, including the 
userland tools and apps, for a specific, non-trivial purpose. 


That depends.  If you consider using LFS to be the only answer you will 
accept, then "No", since as I said, I have never used it.  If you 
consider that I have taken existing code, compiled, rearranged, or added 
to it to save time, then the answer might be "Yes." depending on if you 
accept the answer provisionally


codebase, then I do not see why we are even having

it is very likely that no one on this list as done anything of the 
sort.  If you are setting the bar to ignore anything I might comment on, 
then I suspect I will fall short of your expectations no matter what I 
have done.




I'm not asking for your CV/resume.

  That is
not including other things Unix: like Solaris. No, I have not always had
documentation and sometimes had to figure it would myself.

Documentation is not really the issue.


Is there a more specific answer you wanted?

You have already given me your answer.


(1a) If you have, have you ever implemented your own init system for a
Linux-based OS that you built yourself?

No, I never had a reason to.

Clearly.


As with many things, necessity breeds invention.  I have had no reason to
invent my own when I can modify an existing one to do what I want.

And there we have, in a nutshell, why it's a little disingenuous of
you to raise the "You can always build your own!" argument.

You haven't done this one.


With
respect,

Should I believe you when you say that? (I know it seems to be picky
of me, but I've often found that this particular expression is used
more in the ironic mood. So I ask. Not that it's fair of me to ask,
because I know it's not a question that can be answered meaningfully.
But please don't ask me to assume that assertion means anything,
either.)


I doubt most programmers would bother creating an entirely new init
unless they had a pressing need or just wanted something new.  The whole
point of open source is adaptation.

Perhaps it is to you. But if I needed only adaptation, the Macintosh
is a much more comfortable environment to do the adaptation thing in.

I have other needs. Unfortunately, there is no current OS/community
that can provide me those needs. The nice, though uncomfortable, thing
about the systemd business is that it brought my attention to that
fact.


There are quite a few inits to chose from.  The fact that Systemd was
created in addition to the dozen or so previously existed probably had more
to do with cgroups than anything else if you ask me.

Well, I never said I cared much for cgroups, either. Quite the opposite, really.

cgroups is, in fact, part of the stuff I specifically do not need in my OS.


(2) Having done that much, have you ever kept that system maintained
and updated, even at just the level of keeping only the critical
applications patched or updated against vulnerabilities on a timely
basis?

Yes, I have.

Well, ...


  I used to manage servers for ISPs.  Yes, I'd even patched them
by hand because the OEM no longer provided updates.

Hey, we've all managed servers and/or workstations here, I think. Or
we are learning how. That's not the question I'm asking.

And, since you haven't built the OS from scratch, ...

No. I beg to disagree with you, but I don't think you have maintained
an OS you've built from scratch. Sorry.

Your CV looks promising, but that's not what I'm asking you about.


Okay, there's actually one more question here:

(3) Have you ever done the first two while holding down a full-time,
40+ hour a week job that doesn't particularly make allowances for
employees that need to spend the time necessary for maintaining their
OS?

Well, I can honestly say "No."  As I said, I have never bothered to write a
new init from scratch.

There it is.


What you are really asking

Please don't put words in my mouth.


is when I was working other jobs as we all have,
and maintain my own systems as best I could on my own time.  Sure.  We all
do the best we can.  None of us are perfect and I have never claimed to be
either.

Perfection is hard to achieve, as el viejo used to say. It's also not
really what I'm asking about.


If you have, how long did you keep it up without developing
personality issues for lack of sleep, developing dysfunctional
digestion problems like ulcers and diabetes, and/or ending up breaking
up your family?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I do have some of those problems. Some are bad
enough to where I am probably on medication for the rest of my life.

Sorry to hear that. There are doctors who want to get me on
medications for life, too. Fortunately, I know just enough medicine to
avoid needing what they sell.

I don't think they are particularly evil, but what they want me to
take would kill me. Not immediately, just by gradually making it
impossible for me to keep any sort of job at all. Maybe my
non-standard health has 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[David Wright]

Quoting The Wanderer (wande...@fastmail.fm):
> On 2015-08-31 at 13:25, David Wright wrote:

> > Here's a 
> > comparison of my (admittedly rather noisy) VC login on two systems:
> > 
> > west!david 12:22:14 ~ $ diff -U0 VC-login-*[ey]
> > --- VC-login-jessie 2015-08-31 11:34:23.476573261 -0500
> > +++ VC-login-wheezy 2015-08-31 11:38:11.0 -0500
> 
> How did you get these files?

I've put the method in a new thread with a better title. You can just
see the cat commands in the diff output in my previous posting.

I'll leave others who are more expert to help fix those log lines on
the console. My logging kind of works, but there's something odd about
my /var/log/journal/ files which I suspect is to do with upgrading
this laptop from squeeze through wheezy and sid/testing (when stable
was wheezy) to jessie. So I haven't bothered to look at how logging
works. Another item that will probably fix itself with a clean install.

> ii  systemd-shim  9-1  amd64shim for systemd

I don't have any experience with that.

Cheers,
David.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[T. J. Duchene]

Sorry had an issue that caused a premature post before I could
finish it.  

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 23:11:51 +0900
Joel Rees  wrote:


> 
> There is a difference between what I asked and what you're telling me.
> 
> Simply tweaking and recompiling debian or redhat is not what I'm
> asking about, although it can be tedious enough. Nor is building a
> functioning gentoo really.
> 
> I'm asking if you have built an OS from scratch, including the
> userland tools and apps, for a specific, non-trivial purpose.

That depends.  If you consider using LFS to be the only answer you will 
accept, then "No", since as I said, I have never used it.  If you 
consider that I have taken existing code, compiled, rearranged, or
added to it to save time, then the answer might be "Yes." 

It really depends on if you accept that I have rebuilt most of Linux
over multiple occasions, but never all at once. 

I suspect that anyone who has done so is a tiny minority on this list.
I do not think that it is fair to judge what a person is saying based
on that.

 


> 
> Should I believe you when you say that? 

Whether or not you believe anything I say is entirely up to you.
Personally, I would like to think that you would at least consider it,
but ultimately what we discuss here has very little to do with the
"price of tea in China."


> I know it seems to be picky  of me, but I've often found that this
> particular expression is used more in the ironic mood. 

You don't know me, and that's fine. If you did, when I say I am
offering you respect, you'd know that I mean exactly that.  I might not
always agree with you, but we can have a civilized discussion. 

> 
> Perhaps it is to you. But if I needed only adaptation, the Macintosh
> is a much more comfortable environment to do the adaptation thing in.

If open source means something different to you that is certainly your
prerogative and I have nothing to say about it.  For myself, the whole
point of open code is to improve it and find new uses.


> 
> I have other needs. Unfortunately, there is no current OS/community
> that can provide me those needs. The nice, though uncomfortable, thing
> about the systemd business is that it brought my attention to that
> fact.

I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. =(

I find the systemd issue to be less important because at any point
anyone who can reasonably compile code can assemble something that they
can use - with or without systemd.  For me personally, the important
thing is FOSS: free open source software, not Linux specifically.

Generally speaking, I do not give a damn what certain factions within
Linux does, because if I am motivated, I can and will always be able to
ignore them.  I can take the code and use it as I see fit.   

You could respond that that is impossible for the non-programmer.
Truthfully, I do not think that is entirely the case anymore.  Using
the right setup anyone can compile or assemble a working Linux with a
modicum of personal skill.  I say this because after I showed a few
people how to use configure and make, they were able to take over from
there as long as they were using a stable codebase.  That is not to say
that there can't be issues, but with tools, anyone can follow
directions.



> 
> Please don't put words in my mouth.

Fair enough.  That was never my intent, and if you are offended, I
apologize.  One of the problems with the written word is that it is not
always possible to arrive at the same meaning, and we have different
cultures, which sometimes lead to misunderstandings in non-technical
conversation.

>
> 
> Now, you see, you and I have a very different perspective on things
> here. I don't want to even put Doug into the position of having to
> wonder whether he should learn how to build his own OS from scratch.
> At least, not now, when it would not be very meaningful to do so.

I think that we are less far apart then you do, but in the end it does
not really make much difference to others. 

I would ask "Why is someone using Debian or a Linux in the first
place?" If the answer is only because I do not want Windows, then I
believe that Debian is the wrong place for them. 

Once, I felt as you do, but I realized Debian has at its heart a DIY
philosophy concerned primarily with FOSS.  It has too many rough edges
and usability issues to be a user operating system. That is why Linux
never really succeeded in the consumer world until Android came
along.   



> 
> > I also prefer that in discussions of this nature, that people
> > maintain some logical distance - separating the person from the
> > code.
> 
> No self-respecting engineer will claim that the code he produces can
> be separated from the context he operates in, including his
> personality.
> 
> Sorry if I'm being too blunt with that.

That's fine.  You're welcome to think what you like.  

For myself, code is just code.  It either works or it does not.  It is
literally a mathematical expression that has absolutely nothing 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

2015/09/02 1:04 "Ric Moore" :
>
> On 08/31/2015 11:36 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
>
>> One, I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or respect
>> in practice for" those things.
>
>
> How would that be different from "he does seem to prefer underage girls"?
:0 Ric

Are you really trying to induce or project a sexual orientation slur into
the conversation?

ergo, that someone can use to trumpet about how his enemies lie and gossip
about him?

Or are you saying that if every evil is not equivalent to every other there
must be no evil?

Or did you have something else in mind?

--
Joel Rees

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[tomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 11:36:26AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2015-08-31 at 10:49, Christian Seiler wrote:
> 
> > On 08/31/2015 02:33 PM, The Wanderer wrote:

[...]

> The Subject line is an overstatement, yes, but it's not an entirely
> baseless one. Consider:

[...]

> * Therefore, the only way to avoid the friction which arises from that
> interaction and its undesirable results is to either not use su or not
> use systemd. (And not using systemd is an increasingly
> pushing-against-the-current proposition. It's possible, but it's
> becoming less and less the default.)

Just a question: have you ever considered seriously *doing* anything
about that?

I ask because I'd like myself and I'd like to get an idea whether there's
enough community for that. No flamewars, no mud-slinging, just *doing*.

regards
- -- t
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)

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=ZKiL
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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-09-01 at 07:38, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 11:36:26AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> On 2015-08-31 at 10:49, Christian Seiler wrote:
>> 
>>> On 08/31/2015 02:33 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> The Subject line is an overstatement, yes, but it's not an
>> entirely baseless one. Consider:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> * Therefore, the only way to avoid the friction which arises from
>> that interaction and its undesirable results is to either not use
>> su or not use systemd. (And not using systemd is an increasingly
>> pushing-against-the-current proposition. It's possible, but it's
>> becoming less and less the default.)
> 
> Just a question: have you ever considered seriously *doing* anything
> about that?
> 
> I ask because I'd like myself and I'd like to get an idea whether
> there's enough community for that. No flamewars, no mud-slinging,
> just *doing*.

I've considered it, but - to borrow a phrase from a fragment of
discussion I took part in with Russ Allbery once - I didn't, and don't,
have the spare cycles to do much about it myself.

I was planning to watch the various attempts at alternatives and forks
which people were starting (such as uselessd, already mentioned here on
the list), and investigate them more deeply once I was distanced enough
from the original arguments that I had stress-level depth to spare for
it. So far that hasn't happened, though, and apparently at least some of
these projects have already been abandoned...

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-09-01 at 09:58, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 09:16:10AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> On 2015-09-01 at 07:38, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 11:36:26AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> I ask because I'd like myself and I'd like to get an idea
>>> whether there's enough community for that [...]
> 
>> I've considered it, but - to borrow a phrase from a fragment of
>> discussion I took part in with Russ Allbery once - I didn't, and
>> don't, have the spare cycles to do much about it myself.
> 
> As long as "we" use up our spare cycles bickering, nothing will get
> done :-)

I actually use up most of my "spare cycles" on other projects, mainly
either work-related or in the service of keeping my stress levels down
far enough to remain relatively sane. Of what's left, the unfortunate
reality is that it takes far less to engage in a discussion like this
one than it would to make any difference at all in a project of the type
being suggested.

Which is not to say I'd be entirely opposed to taking part in such a
project, by any means - just that I wouldn't be able to commit to
anything, especially not for the long term, unless and/or until I can
get some of my other things out of the way.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-08-31 at 13:25, David Wright wrote:

> Quoting The Wanderer (wande...@fastmail.fm):
> 
>> Debian could not have chosen systemd if Lennart had not written it,
>> and Debian could not have chosen systemd-in-its-current-form if
>> Lennart had not designed it in that form, so some layer of the
>> blame does fall on him.
> 
> That's a very interesting argument. Can we apply it to Presidents'
> parents?

A person's parents do not design or define that person. They have input,
which is not to be entirely discounted - but even on the assumption that
"nature vs. nurture" gets resolved entirely in favor of nurture, there
are many other sources for "nurture" than just the parents.

Plus, of course, a person has a mind of his/her/etc. own, which a
program or set of programs does not. (Barring AI or obscure arguable
corner cases, anyway.)

All that aside, blaming parents does happen in the real world - things
like "you didn't raise that boy right" appear often enough in certain
parts of the culture.

>> There are plenty of reports of systems which worked just fine with
>> a given configuration which do not work with that configuration
>> after being transitioned to systemd; for one easy non-cosmetic
>> example (there are apparently others), consider the "a failed mount
>> which is not explicitly marked for failures to be ignored will
>> result in a failed boot" behavior, which did not occur without
>> systemd but does happen with systemd.
>> 
>> Yes, you can change your system's configuration to make it work,
>> but in a stable system you shouldn't have to. (And I'm not talking
>> about "stable" in the sense of the Debian repository codenames; I'm
>> talking about 'stable" in the larger sense.)
> 
> I can't see what's wrong with adding new features or with changing 
> defaults. Your example was documented in the release notes.

I was speaking to the claim that systemd represented a lack of
stability, vs. the claim that no instability had been seen because of
systemd. (Paraphrasing in both cases.)

Adding new features, while remaining 100% backwards compatible, is not
ordinarily a problem - except inasmuch as doing so has side effects like
increasing footprint or increasing attack surface, which is a separate
discussion.

Changing defaults isn't inherently a problem either (although I have an
entire other discussion there), but it's difficult to claim that such a
change is stable behavior.

>> On a more cosmetic level, without systemd, if you use a "quiet"
>> option on the kernel command line you will silence kernel output
>> during boot but not silence service-startup (etc.) option during
>> the later stages of the bootstrap process - but with systemd, using
>> that option silences both kernel output _and_ service-startup
>> (etc.) output..
>> 
>> Yes, you can add half-a-dozen-ish systemd-specific options on the
>> kernel command line to get systemd to display the same combination
>> of output types as would have happened by default without systemd -
>> but if you have to change your system configuration in order to get
>> the same behavior, that system is not behaving in a stable
>> fashion.
> 
> All I've added to /etc/default/grub is   systemd.show_status=true
> which gives me about the same level of output from booting as before.
> (A bit more, it's true: eg it says both starting and started for each
> service, and the granularity is finer.)

Hmm. Maybe I'm remembering wrong; I thought that when people complained
about this before, the documentation to which they were pointed listed
various individual options to re-enable various different types of boot
messages separately. I did not see one to enable the messages en-masse
which would not also enable the messages which the original 'quiet'
option would have silenced. If such an option does exist and function,
that blunts this example pretty solidly.

>> Also on a mostly-cosmetic level, if you log in at a text console
>> without systemd, you will get a certain set of messages, coming
>> mostly from login and from your shell - but with systemd, logging
>> in at a text console also produces a mess of extra messages coming
>> from logind, which are largely irrelevant to whoever just logged in
>> and which step all over either the original set of messages or the
>> actual shell prompt.
>> 
>> As far as I've been able to determine, there is no way to get
>> logind to not produce these messages, without also preventing it
>> from producing messages later - or in background logging - which
>> you might actually want. And, if I'm interpreting the situation
>> correctly, you will probably see these messages in your console
>> every time _anyone_ gets a new "session" on that computer, even if
>> it's not you. This is the final-straw behavior which led me to
>> reject systemd for my own systems.

(For clarification, the reason this was the final straw was that it
meant I could not simply ignore the presence of systemd entirely for
normal use, since this would push it 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[tomas]

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On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 09:16:10AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2015-09-01 at 07:38, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 11:36:26AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

[...]

> > I ask because I'd like myself and I'd like to get an idea whether
> > there's enough community for that [...]

> I've considered it, but - to borrow a phrase from a fragment of
> discussion I took part in with Russ Allbery once - I didn't, and don't,
> have the spare cycles to do much about it myself.

As long as "we" use up our spare cycles bickering, nothing will get
done :-)

regards
- -- tomás
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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 5:03 AM, T.J. Duchene  wrote:
>
> On 08/31/2015 05:14 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
>>
>> Actually, there's a couple or three questions going begging here, that
>> I'd like to ask:
>
> Sure, ask away! =)
>
>>
>> (1) TJ, have you ever built LFS? Or, even better, built a running OS
>> on top of the Linux kernel without even the help of the LFS tutorial
>> and tool set?
>
> No, I have never used LFS.

Yeah.

> I have, however rebuilt or otherwise modified:
> Debian, Gentoo, RedHat and others over the last couple decades.

There is a difference between what I asked and what you're telling me.

Simply tweaking and recompiling debian or redhat is not what I'm
asking about, although it can be tedious enough. Nor is building a
functioning gentoo really.

I'm asking if you have built an OS from scratch, including the
userland tools and apps, for a specific, non-trivial purpose.

I'm not asking for your CV/resume.

>  That is
> not including other things Unix: like Solaris. No, I have not always had
> documentation and sometimes had to figure it would myself.

Documentation is not really the issue.

> Is there a more specific answer you wanted?

You have already given me your answer.

>> (1a) If you have, have you ever implemented your own init system for a
>> Linux-based OS that you built yourself?
>
> No, I never had a reason to.

Clearly.

> As with many things, necessity breeds invention.  I have had no reason to
> invent my own when I can modify an existing one to do what I want.

And there we have, in a nutshell, why it's a little disingenuous of
you to raise the "You can always build your own!" argument.

You haven't done this one.

> With
> respect,

Should I believe you when you say that? (I know it seems to be picky
of me, but I've often found that this particular expression is used
more in the ironic mood. So I ask. Not that it's fair of me to ask,
because I know it's not a question that can be answered meaningfully.
But please don't ask me to assume that assertion means anything,
either.)

> I doubt most programmers would bother creating an entirely new init
> unless they had a pressing need or just wanted something new.  The whole
> point of open source is adaptation.

Perhaps it is to you. But if I needed only adaptation, the Macintosh
is a much more comfortable environment to do the adaptation thing in.

I have other needs. Unfortunately, there is no current OS/community
that can provide me those needs. The nice, though uncomfortable, thing
about the systemd business is that it brought my attention to that
fact.

> There are quite a few inits to chose from.  The fact that Systemd was
> created in addition to the dozen or so previously existed probably had more
> to do with cgroups than anything else if you ask me.

Well, I never said I cared much for cgroups, either. Quite the opposite, really.

cgroups is, in fact, part of the stuff I specifically do not need in my OS.

>> (2) Having done that much, have you ever kept that system maintained
>> and updated, even at just the level of keeping only the critical
>> applications patched or updated against vulnerabilities on a timely
>> basis?
>
> Yes, I have.

Well, ...

>  I used to manage servers for ISPs.  Yes, I'd even patched them
> by hand because the OEM no longer provided updates.

Hey, we've all managed servers and/or workstations here, I think. Or
we are learning how. That's not the question I'm asking.

And, since you haven't built the OS from scratch, ...

No. I beg to disagree with you, but I don't think you have maintained
an OS you've built from scratch. Sorry.

Your CV looks promising, but that's not what I'm asking you about.

>> Okay, there's actually one more question here:
>>
>> (3) Have you ever done the first two while holding down a full-time,
>> 40+ hour a week job that doesn't particularly make allowances for
>> employees that need to spend the time necessary for maintaining their
>> OS?
>
> Well, I can honestly say "No."  As I said, I have never bothered to write a
> new init from scratch.

There it is.

> What you are really asking

Please don't put words in my mouth.

> is when I was working other jobs as we all have,
> and maintain my own systems as best I could on my own time.  Sure.  We all
> do the best we can.  None of us are perfect and I have never claimed to be
> either.

Perfection is hard to achieve, as el viejo used to say. It's also not
really what I'm asking about.

>> If you have, how long did you keep it up without developing
>> personality issues for lack of sleep, developing dysfunctional
>> digestion problems like ulcers and diabetes, and/or ending up breaking
>> up your family?
>
> Well, to be perfectly honest, I do have some of those problems. Some are bad
> enough to where I am probably on medication for the rest of my life.

Sorry to hear that. There are doctors who want to get me on
medications for life, too. Fortunately, I know just enough medicine to
avoid needing 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[tomas]

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On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 10:07:28AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2015-09-01 at 09:58, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

[...]

> > As long as "we" use up our spare cycles bickering, nothing will get
> > done :-)
> 
> I actually use up most of my "spare cycles" on other projects [...]

fair enough

> [...] Of what's left, the unfortunate reality is that it takes far
> less to engage in a discussion like this one than it would to make
> any difference at all [...]

How true.

> Which is not to say I'd be entirely opposed to taking part in such a
> project, by any means - just that I wouldn't be able to commit to
> anything, especially not for the long term, unless and/or until I can
> get some of my other things out of the way.

Well, who knows. If there's enough interest, things will move. I'm
still figuring out where I'd fit in all of this.

Regards
- -- tomás
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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Michael Biebl]

Am 01.09.2015 um 15:08 schrieb The Wanderer:

> [  123.134567] systemd-logind[1234]: Failed to start user service:
> Unknown unit: user@1000.service


> Note that this is on a system with only some parts of "the systemd
> suite" present, and with systemd _not_ running as PID1. (I apologize for
> not mentioning that earlier; it's been long enough since I was changing
> any related part of this laptop's config that I didn't remember the
> exact details of how I'd left it.) Specifically:
> 
> $ dpkg -l "*systemd*" | grep ii
> ii  libpam-systemd:amd64  224-1amd64system and servi
> ii  libsystemd0:amd64 224-1amd64systemd utility
> ii  libsystemd0:i386  224-1i386 systemd utility
> ii  systemd   224-1amd64system and servi
> ii  systemd-shim  9-1  amd64shim for systemd

This is https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756247

And yes, this is due to running systemd-logind under
sysvinit/systemd-shim, but not under systemd as PID 1.





-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ric Moore]

On 08/31/2015 11:36 AM, The Wanderer wrote:


One, I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or respect
in practice for" those things.


How would that be different from "he does seem to prefer underage 
girls"? :0 Ric


--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ric Moore]

On 08/31/2015 08:43 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

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On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 08:33:40AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

On 2015-08-31 at 03:47, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:



Slinging mud at people never helps: Lennart Poettering isn't out
there "to get us" -- he's writing free software. He deserves to be
treated respectfully just for that.


While I understand what you're getting at here, and I believe I agree
with the underlying point, I do not agree with this actual statement.

Some people develop and distribute malware as free software. Do they
deserve to be treated with respect for doing that?


So let me correct my instance: I definitely don't assume malice on the
part of Lennart and other systemd people. Just a design taste which is
totally different from mine.


Yeah, I hated modules when they first came out. It was a commie plot. :) Ric

--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Christian Seiler]

On 08/31/2015 02:33 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> Also, while I agree that Lennart is not out "to get us" in the sense of
> malicious laughter and diabolical plans, he _does_ seem to outright
> reject some principles which have been valued in the free-software world
> for decades, to want to see those principles crushed to whatever extent
> they interfere with his own goals, and to have zero sympathy or respect
> in practice for those who do value those principles. The end result may
> not be all that different.

I think that you are - unintentionally - assuming bad faith here, by
claiming Lennart doesn't have any sympathies or respect for other
people's opinions. How would you know that?

Yes, he's done things that you disagree with, even after he was made
aware that people feel strongly about them. But that does not imply a
lack of respect or sympathy for the opposing position in and by itself,
it just implies that he does not share certain ideas, even after having
been confronted with them, or maybe he does share them, but considers
another conflicting principle to be more important for a given
decision.

To give a trivial example of this (and this example may not be valid
anymore, it's been over 10 years that I last tried FreeBSD, so please
just take it as an example and don't read too much into it):

Let's say I write a piece of software with a command line interface and
one of the BSD people comes to me and says: please parse command line
options like BSD tools do, i.e. abort parsing after the first
non-option argument (so that options can't be appended to the end of a
command line), because this is much more in line of how POSIX specifies
that command lines should work. If I decide against that and rather use
the GNU handling of command lines, that allow options to be specified
after non-option arguments (e.g. "ls /etc -l"; BSDs will treat the -l
as an additional path to be examined by ls, not as an option), because
I think the GNU handling is a much better user experience, does that
mean I don't respect the principle of following POSIX? No, I just think
that the principle of having a better user experience (which is
obviously also subjective) is more important here than following POSIX
to the letter.

Or take another example: the GCC team's past reluctance to modularize
the compiler, in order to make it harder for proprietary vendors to
exploit it. Here you have two principles working against each other:
having a modularized compiler that makes writing other software that
processes code (e.g. IDEs, etc.) easier - or making sure that code
using the compiler stays free software. Richard Stallman and the GCC
team decided that the latter was more important than the former, but
does that mean that they didn't respect the other side?

> Agreed. For what it's worth, I don't think this particular iteration of
> the discussion has gotten nearly as heated or as hostile or as harmful
> as many of the previous ones have done.

Sure, but I would rather come to the situation where people can air
their honest disagreements here without resorting to name-calling,
greatly exaggerated hyperbole and assumptions of bad faith.

And while this has not been the worst exchange on this topic, the very
first posting in this thread is a prime example for people assuming bad
faith. Just look at the title of this thread and thus the framing of
the discussion. Instead of talking about what actually happened (that
there's a new alternative to su that fits slightly different use cases)
the title claims that su will disappear. Note that _nobody_ working
on su, neither upstream nor maintaining it in distributions, has
claimed that they will stop.

Christian



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-08-31 at 10:49, Christian Seiler wrote:

> On 08/31/2015 02:33 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Also, while I agree that Lennart is not out "to get us" in the
>> sense of malicious laughter and diabolical plans, he _does_ seem to
>> outright reject some principles which have been valued in the
>> free-software world for decades, to want to see those principles
>> crushed to whatever extent they interfere with his own goals, and
>> to have zero sympathy or respect in practice for those who do value
>> those principles. The end result may not be all that different.
> 
> I think that you are - unintentionally - assuming bad faith here, by
> claiming Lennart doesn't have any sympathies or respect for other
> people's opinions. How would you know that?

Two things:

One, I said that he "_does_ seem to [...] have zero sympathy or respect
in practice for" those things. The words "seem to" were chosen
intentionally; I am actively, though perhaps not entirely successfully,
trying to avoid making assertions of things I can't know.

Two, I base this assessment on the things he has said and the ways in
which he has reacted when people have objected to various of the things
he has done - on his public comments and discussion, more than on what
has been done with systemd itself. (As has been pointed out many times,
systemd is not Lennart's baby alone, and he isn't the only one who
decides what happens with it.)

I don't have any specific examples of such comments ready to hand (I
frankly try to avoid thinking about that whole mess any more than I can
avoid, just for the sake of my own stress levels), and even if I did,
most of them by themselves don't look all that damning; it's only in the
aggregate that the picture forms.

I would _love_ to see examples indicating that he does respect those
whose values conflict with his own in these areas (or, even better, that
he does value the principles in question, even if he concludes that $X
other principles outweigh them), but I'm not even sure what would
constitute a recognizable example of that.

(If anything, I would say it's less that I'm assuming bad faith than
that I'm _concluding_ bad faith. I don't think I'm doing either, but the
latter would probably be closer to being accurate.)

>> Agreed. For what it's worth, I don't think this particular
>> iteration of the discussion has gotten nearly as heated or as
>> hostile or as harmful as many of the previous ones have done.
> 
> Sure, but I would rather come to the situation where people can air
> their honest disagreements here without resorting to name-calling,
> greatly exaggerated hyperbole and assumptions of bad faith.

I entirely agree, but given how far apart philosophically the sides of
this disagreement are, I'm not at all sure that it's reasonable to
expect that there will not be anyone even in the lowest grades of either
side who does not go that far.

> And while this has not been the worst exchange on this topic, the
> very first posting in this thread is a prime example for people
> assuming bad faith. Just look at the title of this thread and thus
> the framing of the discussion. Instead of talking about what actually
> happened (that there's a new alternative to su that fits slightly
> different use cases) the title claims that su will disappear. Note
> that _nobody_ working on su, neither upstream nor maintaining it in
> distributions, has claimed that they will stop.

Nobody working on sysvinit claimed that they would stop doing that when
systemd came along and Lennart started claiming that it was the vastly
better approach, either, and yet sysvinit is well on the way to becoming
marginalized. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable at first glance to
expect something similar to happen again, since presumably this new tool
will get installed along with systemd and the systemd ecosystem will
provide pressure (however minor or oblique) to use it. (Closer
examination may well reveal that it _is_ unreasonable on deeper
analysis.)

The Subject line is an overstatement, yes, but it's not an entirely
baseless one. Consider:

* There is apparently an interaction between su and the collection of
binaries which are known collectively as "systemd" which produces
undesirable results, and is at least arguably a bug.

* Lennart refuses to change that collection of binaries in order to
prevent this interaction from causing these results, on the grounds that
A: su is ill-defined to begin with (or so he asserts), and B: an
alternative tool which he thinks is better is already available as part
of the collection of binaries which are known collectively as "systemd".

* Therefore, the only way to avoid the friction which arises from that
interaction and its undesirable results is to either not use su or not
use systemd. (And not using systemd is an increasingly
pushing-against-the-current proposition. It's possible, but it's
becoming less and less the default.)

* Therefore there is increased disincentive to use su, and 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 31 August 2015 16:36:26 The Wanderer wrote:
> Lennart's proposed alternative (to su)

After all this discussion, I thought that I ought really to find out what 
Lennart was proposing, and I must say that it looks remarkably 
disability-unfriendly. :-(

For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times in 
succession inside a second.

https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Nicolas George]

Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times in 
> succession inside a second.
> 
> https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/

Are you referring to that snippet:

# Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session.

... or are you referring to other parts of the page that I missed or parts
in the video?

If you are referring to that snippet, I suspect you are reading it wrong.

For once, it is "^]", i.e. Ctrl-], i.e. ASCII 0x1D, aka "group separator".

You can notice it is the same as the "escape character" present in most
telnet implementations.

And my second point is: it is obviously meant for emergency exit, like
tilde-point in SSH. You should need it almost never in normal use, where you
exit either by typing the command "exit" or by sending the EOF code (usually
Ctrl-D), just like su.

Actually, AFAIK neither sudo nor su support an emergency exit sequence. If
that has not bothered you until now, it should not bother you from now on
either.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Christian Seiler]

On 08/31/2015 05:36 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> Two, I base this assessment on the things he has said and the ways in
> which he has reacted when people have objected to various of the things
> he has done - on his public comments and discussion,

I get the opposite impression, that's why I responded they way I did to
your assertion.

I don't want to talk behind the back about someone without them being
present, so I'll not go into further detail - but just the fact that I
have a completely different impression than you do may indicate that
you are indeed subconsciously not trying to assume good faith on his
part.

>> Sure, but I would rather come to the situation where people can air
>> their honest disagreements here without resorting to name-calling,
>> greatly exaggerated hyperbole and assumptions of bad faith.
> 
> I entirely agree, but given how far apart philosophically the sides of
> this disagreement are, I'm not at all sure that it's reasonable to
> expect that there will not be anyone even in the lowest grades of either
> side who does not go that far.

The problem is not that there is every once in a while somebody who
crosses the line a bit, because things got a bit emotional - the
problem is that I see it far too often that systemd opponents cross
that line - just take my two initial replies in this thread as an
example.

>> And while this has not been the worst exchange on this topic, the
>> very first posting in this thread is a prime example for people
>> assuming bad faith. Just look at the title of this thread and thus
>> the framing of the discussion. Instead of talking about what actually
>> happened (that there's a new alternative to su that fits slightly
>> different use cases) the title claims that su will disappear. Note
>> that _nobody_ working on su, neither upstream nor maintaining it in
>> distributions, has claimed that they will stop.
> 
> Nobody working on sysvinit claimed that they would stop doing that when
> systemd came along and Lennart started claiming that it was the vastly
> better approach, either, and yet sysvinit is well on the way to becoming
> marginalized. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable at first glance to
> expect something similar to happen again,

There are two very important distinctions:

1. Most importantly, there can only be one central init system active
at any given time. init systems are special in that way. This is
definitely not the case with su - there are already alternatives to su
installed on many systems - take sudo and pkexec. So the fact that
there's now another alternative - even if it happens to be installed on
every system by default - will not mean that su is going to be
disappear - just because su will still work as it did before even if an
alternative is present.

2. Also, very many people were yearning desperately for an alternative
to sysvinit. You might not have been, other people opposed to systemd
might not have been - but there's a reason why sysvinit wasn't even a
strong contender in the TC decision in Debian (that was systemd vs.
upstart vs. maybe openrc) - because a lot of people were actively
looking for something that fixed a lot of the conceptual problems it
has. You might disagree here, and I really don't want to reiterate the
discussion on that specific topic - my point just is that there were a
lot of people (myself included) that were really glad when systemd
came along, because it really filled a need that was present in at
least parts of the community. I don't see anything even remotely
similar going on with su. Most people who use su are perfectly happy
with it and are not looking for something new.

> * There is apparently an interaction between su and the collection of
> binaries which are known collectively as "systemd" which produces
> undesirable results, and is at least arguably a bug.

Yes, but if you look closely the problem is the following: a certain
environment variable that is set by libpam-systemd upon login, namely
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, is not set when using su. If you don't use the
systemd components, that environment variable isn't set at all - and
from my personal experience, I have never needed the functionality for
which the variable is used in shells I've opened with su. So it's not
like su is suddenly broken - it's just that some specific new use cases
don't work properly with it.

If you're currently happy with su, nothing will change for you.

> * Lennart refuses to change that collection of binaries in order to
> prevent this interaction from causing these results, on the grounds that
> A: su is ill-defined to begin with (or so he asserts),

Well, kind of. The problem is that there are lots of bits an pieces
that go into the concept of what a 'session' is under Linux - and su
has historically altered some of those things, but kept others to be
the same as the session it was called from. Since the part of the
session that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is tied to is not changed by su, the
systemd developers 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Christian Seiler]

On 08/31/2015 05:48 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> On Monday 31 August 2015 16:36:26 The Wanderer wrote:
>> Lennart's proposed alternative (to su)
> 
> After all this discussion, I thought that I ought really to find out what 
> Lennart was proposing, and I must say that it looks remarkably 
> disability-unfriendly. :-(
> 
> For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times in 
> succession inside a second.

Well, if you want to force-close the session. su/sudo/pkexec don't
support that at all, as far as I know, so while there certainly is room
for improvement when it comes to accessibility (and the formulation of
the message) here, it isn't worse than su/sudo either.

If you want to exit the shell normally, typically the 'exit' command
will suffice (it depends on your shell, obviously).

Christian



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Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 31 August 2015 17:43:00 Christian Seiler wrote:
> On 08/31/2015 05:48 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > On Monday 31 August 2015 16:36:26 The Wanderer wrote:
> >> Lennart's proposed alternative (to su)
> >
> > After all this discussion, I thought that I ought really to find out what
> > Lennart was proposing, and I must say that it looks remarkably
> > disability-unfriendly. :-(
> >
> > For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times
> > in succession inside a second.
>
> Well, if you want to force-close the session. su/sudo/pkexec don't
> support that at all, as far as I know, so while there certainly is room
> for improvement when it comes to accessibility (and the formulation of
> the message) here, it isn't worse than su/sudo either.
>
> If you want to exit the shell normally, typically the 'exit' command
> will suffice (it depends on your shell, obviously).


It seems to be even worse:
$ machinectl shell
Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session.
sh-4.3# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) 
context=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0
sh-4.3# whoami  
root
sh-4.3#
so: ^]

Su is _much_ easier to type, and there is no restrictive time limit on how 
long you can take typing it.

the illustration shows moving from user to root. $ to #

It is, as I said, very disability unfriendly.  su is not.

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Nicolas George]

Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> Su is _much_ easier to type, and there is no restrictive time limit on how 
> long you can take typing it.
> 
> the illustration shows moving from user to root. $ to #
> 
> It is, as I said, very disability unfriendly.  su is not.

What are you talking about? The command to start the shell, or the key
sequence to exit it?

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


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Description: Digital signature

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 31 August 2015 18:08:21 pecon...@mesanetworks.net wrote:
> On a jessie system, I can interrupt an Emacs file edit session with cntrlZ.
> My only self acknowledged disabilities are mild loss of cognitive function
> and frequent finger fumbles at the keyboard, so I don't know what a person
> who cannot press-and-hold cntrl and then press Z must do, but surely key
> entry of cntrlZ is already a solved problem, but maybe not.

Does  cntrlZ give you a root shell so that you can function as root?  If not, 
in what way is it an alternative to su?

Could you possibly not answer, if you answer, to my private address, but only 
to Debian list?  Thanks.

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 31 August 2015 16:59:48 Nicolas George wrote:
> Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> > For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times
> > in succession inside a second.
> >
> > https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
>
> Are you referring to that snippet:
>
> # Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit
> session.
>
> ... or are you referring to other parts of the page that I missed or parts
> in the video?
>
> If you are referring to that snippet, I suspect you are reading it wrong.
>
> For once, it is "^]", i.e. Ctrl-], i.e. ASCII 0x1D, aka "group separator".
>
> You can notice it is the same as the "escape character" present in most
> telnet implementations.
>
> And my second point is: it is obviously meant for emergency exit, like
> tilde-point in SSH. You should need it almost never in normal use, where
> you exit either by typing the command "exit" or by sending the EOF code
> (usually Ctrl-D), just like su.
>
> Actually, AFAIK neither sudo nor su support an emergency exit sequence. If
> that has not bothered you until now, it should not bother you from now on
> either.

Then I have misunderstood, which does not surprise me.  

What is the alternative to su that there is so much fuss about?  And I don't 
care about the session ending function it apparently has.   will change 
me to root and  will change me to the user.  Is that what people 
fear will disappear?  And what do they fear will be put in its place?  (Yes, 
I understand that so far it is in addition, not instead of, but what is the 
fuss about?  What has Lennart proposed?)

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[David Wright]

Quoting The Wanderer (wande...@fastmail.fm):

> Debian could not have chosen systemd if Lennart had not written it, and
> Debian could not have chosen systemd-in-its-current-form if Lennart had
> not designed it in that form, so some layer of the blame does fall on
> him.

That's a very interesting argument. Can we apply it to Presidents' parents?

> There are plenty of reports of systems which worked just fine with a
> given configuration which do not work with that configuration after
> being transitioned to systemd; for one easy non-cosmetic example (there
> are apparently others), consider the "a failed mount which is not
> explicitly marked for failures to be ignored will result in a failed
> boot" behavior, which did not occur without systemd but does happen with
> systemd.
> 
> Yes, you can change your system's configuration to make it work, but in
> a stable system you shouldn't have to. (And I'm not talking about
> "stable" in the sense of the Debian repository codenames; I'm talking
> about 'stable" in the larger sense.)

I can't see what's wrong with adding new features or with changing
defaults. Your example was documented in the release notes.
Personally I'm more unhappy with the fact that the fstab man page
implies the file is interpreted whereas systemd's behaviour is more
like as if it's been compiled.

> On a more cosmetic level, without systemd, if you use a "quiet" option
> on the kernel command line you will silence kernel output during boot
> but not silence service-startup (etc.) option during the later stages of
> the bootstrap process - but with systemd, using that option silences
> both kernel output _and_ service-startup (etc.) output..
> 
> Yes, you can add half-a-dozen-ish systemd-specific options on the kernel
> command line to get systemd to display the same combination of output
> types as would have happened by default without systemd - but if you
> have to change your system configuration in order to get the same
> behavior, that system is not behaving in a stable fashion.

All I've added to /etc/default/grub is   systemd.show_status=true
which gives me about the same level of output from booting as
before. (A bit more, it's true: eg it says both starting and started
for each service, and the granularity is finer.)

> Also on a mostly-cosmetic level, if you log in at a text console without
> systemd, you will get a certain set of messages, coming mostly from
> login and from your shell - but with systemd, logging in at a text
> console also produces a mess of extra messages coming from logind, which
> are largely irrelevant to whoever just logged in and which step all over
> either the original set of messages or the actual shell prompt.
> 
> As far as I've been able to determine, there is no way to get logind to
> not produce these messages, without also preventing it from producing
> messages later - or in background logging - which you might actually
> want. And, if I'm interpreting the situation correctly, you will
> probably see these messages in your console every time _anyone_ gets a
> new "session" on that computer, even if it's not you. This is the
> final-straw behavior which led me to reject systemd for my own systems.

I've tried to work out what you're talking about here. Here's a
comparison of my (admittedly rather noisy) VC login on two systems:

west!david 12:22:14 ~ $ diff -U0 VC-login-*[ey]
--- VC-login-jessie 2015-08-31 11:34:23.476573261 -0500
+++ VC-login-wheezy 2015-08-31 11:38:11.0 -0500
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+[] Starting MTA:hostname --fqdn did not return a fully qualified
name, dc_minimaldns will not work.
+Please fix your /etc/hosts setup.
+[ ok 4.
@@ -2 +5 @@
-Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid west tty2 Mon Aug 31  2015  11:32:04
+Debian GNU/Linux 7 wheezy alum tty1 Mon Aug 31  2015  06:01:14
@@ -4 +7 @@
-west login: david
+alum login: david
@@ -6,2 +9,2 @@
-Last login: Mon Aug 31 08:37:15 CDT 2015 on tty2
-Linux west 3.16.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u3
(2015-08-04) i686
+Last login: Mon Aug 31 09:44:02 CDT 2015 from west on pts/3
+Linux alum 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.68-1+deb7u3 i686
@@ -15 +18 @@
-You have new mail.
+You have mail.
@@ -18,6 +21,6 @@
-(This is /home/david/.bash-1-west 2015 July 13 on jessie)
-(This is /home/david/.bash-9-west 2015 August 04)
-Disks last checked: Tuesday 18 August
-west!david 11:32:11 ~ $ ls -l /sbin/init
-lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 May 26 11:40 /sbin/init ->
/lib/systemd/systemd
-west!david 11:33:27 ~ $ cat > VC-login-jessie
+(This is /home/david/.bash-1-alum 2015 July 13 on wheezy)
+(This is /home/david/.bash-9-alum 2015 July 29)
+Disks last checked: Friday 28 August
+alum!david 11:37:01 ~ $ ls -l /sbin/init
+-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 35216 Jul 17  2013 /sbin/init
+alum!david 11:37:12 ~ $ cat > VC-login-wheezy
1 west!david 12:22:24 ~ $ 

> (And, no, logind is not systemd-the-PID1-binary - but is part of
> systemd-the-collection-of-other-binaries-which-orbit-that-binary, and is
> 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 31 August 2015 18:12:44 Nicolas George wrote:
> What are you talking about? The command to start the shell, or the key
> sequence to exit it?

Using su to change user.

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Nicolas George]

Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> > What are you talking about? The command to start the shell, or the key
> > sequence to exit it?
> Using su to change user.

Then I do not agree with your statement that "machinectl shell" is less
disability-friendly than su, quite the contrary.

Two-letters commands are a scarce resource, there are only 676 of them
(assuming you do not want to mix case), and much less of them that look or
sound like something.

"machinectl shell" is long to type, there is no doubt about, but at that
cost, it does not pollute the command namespace: you do not type it by
accident, it does not clutter completion. If you need it infrequently,
typing all of it is negligible; if you need it frequently, you can use a
shell alias to make it shorter: alias mcshell="machinectl shell"; if you
need it very very frequently, you can even decide to give it a single letter
alias. Entirely your choice.

su, on the other hand, is taking a valuable 1/676 of the completion
namespace for itself, whether you use it or not, whether you want it or not.

If Poettering had used a short command for his new tool, that would have
been a valid complaint against it, because anyone can make something they
use shorter and more accessible, but once something is in the way, it stays
there.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Nicolas George]

Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> Then I have misunderstood, which does not surprise me.  

With all the disinformation flying around when it comes to systemd, it is
hardly surprising.

> What is the alternative to su that there is so much fuss about?  And I don't 
> care about the session ending function it apparently has.

Well, it may happen that some day you will be glad it has it, and until
then, it is very unlikely to get in your way in any way.

> will change 
> me to root and  will change me to the user.

The thing is, when you are switching user like that, there is a lot of black
magic going on inside the TTY layer of the kernel to ensure that it seems to
work like it always do: ctrl-C to interrupt the program, ctrl-Z to suspend
it, input going to the correct command, etc. Furthermore, the new user is a
spawn of the old user's process, and as such it inherits most of its
environment.

This kind of black magic is quite annoying for people designing systems
because it makes auditing for security that much harder: what if the users
destroys the tty at the wrong time? what if the user sets the LC_SOMETHING
variable to a strange valuue? su implementations try to sanitize the
environment, but there have been various failures in the past that have
resulted in security issues.

I have not looked at how machinectl shell works, but my guess is that it
works like a lightweight local SSH: the new user and the old user are not
related as processes, they only communicate through a socket. The new user
process is started by systemd, with a sane and controlled environment. With
a more isolated and controlled model like that, security audit is much
easier.

>Is that what people 
> fear will disappear?  And what do they fear will be put in its place?  (Yes, 
> I understand that so far it is in addition, not instead of, but what is the 
> fuss about?  What has Lennart proposed?)

I would not like to make cheap psychology, but I have the impression that a
lot of people flying mud against systemd are actually afraid that the
knowledge and competence they accumulated over the years will become
obsolete.

There are valid criticisms to be made against systemd, both on a technical
and political level. I myself find it too complex over-engineered.

But still, the old init system was completely braindead (more on that on
demand), and systemd is the only revamp that managed to get traction while
getting in the right direction of having an init system with an actual
brain.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 19:42:20 +0200
Nicolas George  wrote:

> Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> > > What are you talking about? The command to start the shell, or the key
> > > sequence to exit it?
> > Using su to change user.
> 
> Then I do not agree with your statement that "machinectl shell" is less
> disability-friendly than su, quite the contrary.
> 
> Two-letters commands are a scarce resource, there are only 676 of them
> (assuming you do not want to mix case), and much less of them that look or
> sound like something.
> 
> "machinectl shell" is long to type, there is no doubt about, but at that
> cost, it does not pollute the command namespace: you do not type it by
> accident, it does not clutter completion. If you need it infrequently,
> typing all of it is negligible; if you need it frequently, you can use a
> shell alias to make it shorter: alias mcshell="machinectl shell"; if you
> need it very very frequently, you can even decide to give it a single letter
> alias. Entirely your choice.

Have you ever tried to dictate some commands over the phone (bonus
points are granted if the recipient does not know English)? In this
particular case, "more is less", and "less is more".

Reco 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:25:09 +0100
Lisi Reisz  wrote:

> On Monday 31 August 2015 16:59:48 Nicolas George wrote:
> > Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> > > For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times
> > > in succession inside a second.
> > >
> > > https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
> >
> > Are you referring to that snippet:
> >
> > # Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit
> > session.
> >
> > ... or are you referring to other parts of the page that I missed or parts
> > in the video?
> >
> > If you are referring to that snippet, I suspect you are reading it wrong.
> >
> > For once, it is "^]", i.e. Ctrl-], i.e. ASCII 0x1D, aka "group separator".
> >
> > You can notice it is the same as the "escape character" present in most
> > telnet implementations.
> >
> > And my second point is: it is obviously meant for emergency exit, like
> > tilde-point in SSH. You should need it almost never in normal use, where
> > you exit either by typing the command "exit" or by sending the EOF code
> > (usually Ctrl-D), just like su.
> >
> > Actually, AFAIK neither sudo nor su support an emergency exit sequence. If
> > that has not bothered you until now, it should not bother you from now on
> > either.
> 
> Then I have misunderstood, which does not surprise me.  
> 
> What is the alternative to su that there is so much fuss about?  And I don't 
> care about the session ending function it apparently has.   will change 
> me to root and  will change me to the user.  Is that what people 
> fear will disappear?  And what do they fear will be put in its place?  (Yes, 
> I understand that so far it is in addition, not instead of, but what is the 
> fuss about?  What has Lennart proposed?)

It's really simple.

1) Boot with init=/bin/sh kernel commandline.

2) Invoke su - . Observe the result.

3) Invoke "machinectl shell". Observe the result.

4) Compare results from 2) and 3).

Reco

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Erwan David]

Le 31/08/2015 20:27, Reco a écrit :
>  Hi.
>
> On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:25:09 +0100
> Lisi Reisz  wrote:
>
>> On Monday 31 August 2015 16:59:48 Nicolas George wrote:
>>> Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
 For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times
 in succession inside a second.

 https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
>>> Are you referring to that snippet:
>>>
>>> # Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit
>>> session.
>>>
>>> ... or are you referring to other parts of the page that I missed or parts
>>> in the video?
>>>
>>> If you are referring to that snippet, I suspect you are reading it wrong.
>>>
>>> For once, it is "^]", i.e. Ctrl-], i.e. ASCII 0x1D, aka "group separator".
>>>
>>> You can notice it is the same as the "escape character" present in most
>>> telnet implementations.
>>>
>>> And my second point is: it is obviously meant for emergency exit, like
>>> tilde-point in SSH. You should need it almost never in normal use, where
>>> you exit either by typing the command "exit" or by sending the EOF code
>>> (usually Ctrl-D), just like su.
>>>
>>> Actually, AFAIK neither sudo nor su support an emergency exit sequence. If
>>> that has not bothered you until now, it should not bother you from now on
>>> either.
>> Then I have misunderstood, which does not surprise me.  
>>
>> What is the alternative to su that there is so much fuss about?  And I don't 
>> care about the session ending function it apparently has.   will change 
>> me to root and  will change me to the user.  Is that what people 
>> fear will disappear?  And what do they fear will be put in its place?  (Yes, 
>> I understand that so far it is in addition, not instead of, but what is the 
>> fuss about?  What has Lennart proposed?)
> It's really simple.
>
> 1) Boot with init=/bin/sh kernel commandline.
>
> 2) Invoke su - . Observe the result.
>
> 3) Invoke "machinectl shell". Observe the result.
>
> 4) Compare results from 2) and 3).
>
> Reco
>
>

This does nbot say anything aboiut su. Just that systemd was done
AGAINST unix and unix users. And thus does noit work well with unix command.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Lisi Reisz]

On Monday 31 August 2015 19:27:31 Reco wrote:
>  Hi.
>
> On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:25:09 +0100
>
> Lisi Reisz  wrote:
> > On Monday 31 August 2015 16:59:48 Nicolas George wrote:
> > > Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> > > > For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three
> > > > times in succession inside a second.
> > > >
> > > > https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
> > >
> > > Are you referring to that snippet:
> > >
> > > # Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit
> > > session.
> > >
> > > ... or are you referring to other parts of the page that I missed or
> > > parts in the video?
> > >
> > > If you are referring to that snippet, I suspect you are reading it
> > > wrong.
> > >
> > > For once, it is "^]", i.e. Ctrl-], i.e. ASCII 0x1D, aka "group
> > > separator".
> > >
> > > You can notice it is the same as the "escape character" present in most
> > > telnet implementations.
> > >
> > > And my second point is: it is obviously meant for emergency exit, like
> > > tilde-point in SSH. You should need it almost never in normal use,
> > > where you exit either by typing the command "exit" or by sending the
> > > EOF code (usually Ctrl-D), just like su.
> > >
> > > Actually, AFAIK neither sudo nor su support an emergency exit sequence.
> > > If that has not bothered you until now, it should not bother you from
> > > now on either.
> >
> > Then I have misunderstood, which does not surprise me.
> >
> > What is the alternative to su that there is so much fuss about?  And I
> > don't care about the session ending function it apparently has.  
> > will change me to root and  will change me to the user.  Is
> > that what people fear will disappear?  And what do they fear will be put
> > in its place?  (Yes, I understand that so far it is in addition, not
> > instead of, but what is the fuss about?  What has Lennart proposed?)
>
> It's really simple.
>
> 1) Boot with init=/bin/sh kernel commandline.
>
> 2) Invoke su - . Observe the result.
>
> 3) Invoke "machinectl shell". Observe the result.
>
> 4) Compare results from 2) and 3).

Thanks for the replies.  But I still don't know what is "going" and what 
is "coming".

Oh well, I shall no doubt discover.  At the moment on my Jessie machine I can 
open a terminal, su into root, perform whatever it is, and su out.

I'll worry about it when/if I can't.

Is the proposed change only going to have an effect so early in the process?

But I'll try the above, Reco.

Lisi

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Brian]

On Mon 31 Aug 2015 at 11:36:26 -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

> The Subject line is an overstatement, yes, but it's not an entirely
> baseless one. Consider:

The power of language! What is clearly a distortion of the situation
related at

  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825

becomes an "overstatement", a minor matter; nothing to worry about; the
lad just got carried away and, anyway, all things in love and war etc.

And because it is an "overstatement" it is accorded a status which
merits serious discussion on this List instead of being dismissed for
what it is.

Yet more advocacy to add to the 3,200+ posts we have in -user. Only
about 1.5% of them are from the OP but he is trying hard to get up to
2%. :) The fight must go on! To hell with helping users.

The Subject line and the mail content are entirely baseless because they
have twisted the facts to support a particular view. If the OP had
wished to discuss the technical merits of the addition to systemd his
mail would have looked different. Why it didn't is left as an exercise
for the reader.

"There must be some truth in that rumour. It cannot be baseless" is
quite a common view.

-- 
Sent from my init-agnostic account.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 19:40:54 +0100
Lisi Reisz  wrote:

> On Monday 31 August 2015 19:27:31 Reco wrote:
> >  Hi.
> >
> > On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:25:09 +0100
> >
> > Lisi Reisz  wrote:
> > > On Monday 31 August 2015 16:59:48 Nicolas George wrote:
> > > > Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
> > > > > For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three
> > > > > times in succession inside a second.
> > > > >
> > > > > https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
> > > >
> > > > Are you referring to that snippet:
> > > >
> > > > # Connected to the local host. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit
> > > > session.
> > > >
> > > > ... or are you referring to other parts of the page that I missed or
> > > > parts in the video?
> > > >
> > > > If you are referring to that snippet, I suspect you are reading it
> > > > wrong.
> > > >
> > > > For once, it is "^]", i.e. Ctrl-], i.e. ASCII 0x1D, aka "group
> > > > separator".
> > > >
> > > > You can notice it is the same as the "escape character" present in most
> > > > telnet implementations.
> > > >
> > > > And my second point is: it is obviously meant for emergency exit, like
> > > > tilde-point in SSH. You should need it almost never in normal use,
> > > > where you exit either by typing the command "exit" or by sending the
> > > > EOF code (usually Ctrl-D), just like su.
> > > >
> > > > Actually, AFAIK neither sudo nor su support an emergency exit sequence.
> > > > If that has not bothered you until now, it should not bother you from
> > > > now on either.
> > >
> > > Then I have misunderstood, which does not surprise me.
> > >
> > > What is the alternative to su that there is so much fuss about?  And I
> > > don't care about the session ending function it apparently has.  
> > > will change me to root and  will change me to the user.  Is
> > > that what people fear will disappear?  And what do they fear will be put
> > > in its place?  (Yes, I understand that so far it is in addition, not
> > > instead of, but what is the fuss about?  What has Lennart proposed?)
> >
> > It's really simple.
> >
> > 1) Boot with init=/bin/sh kernel commandline.
> >
> > 2) Invoke su - . Observe the result.
> >
> > 3) Invoke "machinectl shell". Observe the result.
> >
> > 4) Compare results from 2) and 3).
> 
> Thanks for the replies.  But I still don't know what is "going" and what 
> is "coming".

2) should work. 3) should not.

Since booting with "init=/bin/sh" is one of the valid ways of
thoubleshooting failing OS, replacing "su" with "machinectl shell"
effectively limits usefulness of such approach.

I'm *not* saying that it will render "boot with init=/bin/sh"
completely useless, for the record. But this long road consists of
small steps, and some of them have been taken already.


> Oh well, I shall no doubt discover.  At the moment on my Jessie machine I can 
> open a terminal, su into root, perform whatever it is, and su out.
> 
> I'll worry about it when/if I can't.

That's my approach too (but I have the contingency plan already :).

 
> Is the proposed change only going to have an effect so early in the process?

Of course, not. "machinectl login" should provide the user with a new
"session" (whatever that term means in newspeak). The whole idea of [1]
is that "su" does not do so (whenever it should is another topic),
therefore "su" should be replaced.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825

Reco

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Brian]

On Mon 31 Aug 2015 at 19:42:18 +0100, Brian wrote:

> Yet more advocacy to add to the 3,200+ posts we have in -user. Only
> about 1.5% of them are from the OP but he is trying hard to get up to
> 2%. :)

That bit was incorrect. The 1.5% is for the OP's sycophantic responder.
The OP is only on about 0.6%. But he is trying hard to catch up with the
leaders. :)

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Charlie Kravetz]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 19:42:20 +0200
Nicolas George  wrote:

>Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
>> > What are you talking about? The command to start the shell, or the key
>> > sequence to exit it?
>> Using su to change user.
>
>Then I do not agree with your statement that "machinectl shell" is less
>disability-friendly than su, quite the contrary.
>
>Two-letters commands are a scarce resource, there are only 676 of them
>(assuming you do not want to mix case), and much less of them that look or
>sound like something.
>
>"machinectl shell" is long to type, there is no doubt about, but at that
>cost, it does not pollute the command namespace: you do not type it by
>accident, it does not clutter completion. If you need it infrequently,
>typing all of it is negligible; if you need it frequently, you can use a
>shell alias to make it shorter: alias mcshell="machinectl shell"; if you
>need it very very frequently, you can even decide to give it a single letter
>alias. Entirely your choice.
>
>su, on the other hand, is taking a valuable 1/676 of the completion
>namespace for itself, whether you use it or not, whether you want it or not.
>
>If Poettering had used a short command for his new tool, that would have
>been a valid complaint against it, because anyone can make something they
>use shorter and more accessible, but once something is in the way, it stays
>there.
>
>Regards,
>

To exit the shell created with "machinectl shell", you are instructed
"Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session." That is very
unfriendly for disabled. Not all can hit any key in 1 second. To
specify two keys is even harder. There has never been mention of any
other method to exit this new shell command.

-- 
Charlie Kravetz
Linux Registered User Number 425914
[http://linuxcounter.net/user/425914.html]
Never let anyone steal your DREAM.   [http://keepingdreams.com]

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Erwan David]

Le 31/08/2015 20:53, Charlie Kravetz a écrit :
> On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 19:42:20 +0200
> Nicolas George  wrote:
>
>> Le quartidi 14 fructidor, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit :
 What are you talking about? The command to start the shell, or the key
 sequence to exit it?
>>> Using su to change user.
>> Then I do not agree with your statement that "machinectl shell" is less
>> disability-friendly than su, quite the contrary.
>>
>> Two-letters commands are a scarce resource, there are only 676 of them
>> (assuming you do not want to mix case), and much less of them that look or
>> sound like something.
>>
>> "machinectl shell" is long to type, there is no doubt about, but at that
>> cost, it does not pollute the command namespace: you do not type it by
>> accident, it does not clutter completion. If you need it infrequently,
>> typing all of it is negligible; if you need it frequently, you can use a
>> shell alias to make it shorter: alias mcshell="machinectl shell"; if you
>> need it very very frequently, you can even decide to give it a single letter
>> alias. Entirely your choice.
>>
>> su, on the other hand, is taking a valuable 1/676 of the completion
>> namespace for itself, whether you use it or not, whether you want it or not.
>>
>> If Poettering had used a short command for his new tool, that would have
>> been a valid complaint against it, because anyone can make something they
>> use shorter and more accessible, but once something is in the way, it stays
>> there.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
> To exit the shell created with "machinectl shell", you are instructed
> "Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session." That is very
> unfriendly for disabled. Not all can hit any key in 1 second. To
> specify two keys is even harder. There has never been mention of any
> other method to exit this new shell command.
>

It is also very US centric, because on non US keybaord that combination
can be difficult to press (eg on french keyboard).

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[T.J. Duchene]

On 08/31/2015 05:14 AM, Joel Rees wrote:


Actually, there's a couple or three questions going begging here, that
I'd like to ask:

Sure, ask away! =)



(1) TJ, have you ever built LFS? Or, even better, built a running OS
on top of the Linux kernel without even the help of the LFS tutorial
and tool set?
No, I have never used LFS.  I have, however rebuilt or otherwise 
modified: Debian, Gentoo, RedHat and others over the last couple 
decades.   That is not including other things Unix: like Solaris. No, I 
have not always had documentation and sometimes had to figure it would 
myself.


Is there a more specific answer you wanted?


(1a) If you have, have you ever implemented your own init system for a
Linux-based OS that you built yourself?

No, I never had a reason to.

As with many things, necessity breeds invention.  I have had no reason 
to invent my own when I can modify an existing one to do what I want. 
With respect, I doubt most programmers would bother creating an entirely 
new init unless they had a pressing need or just wanted something new.  
The whole point of open source is adaptation.


There are quite a few inits to chose from.  The fact that Systemd was 
created in addition to the dozen or so previously existed probably had 
more to do with cgroups than anything else if you ask me.


(2) Having done that much, have you ever kept that system maintained
and updated, even at just the level of keeping only the critical
applications patched or updated against vulnerabilities on a timely
basis?
Yes, I have.  I used to manage servers for ISPs.  Yes, I'd even patched 
them by hand because the OEM no longer provided updates.

Okay, there's actually one more question here:

(3) Have you ever done the first two while holding down a full-time,
40+ hour a week job that doesn't particularly make allowances for
employees that need to spend the time necessary for maintaining their
OS?
Well, I can honestly say "No."  As I said, I have never bothered to 
write a new init from scratch.


What you are really asking is when I was working other jobs as we all 
have, and maintain my own systems as best I could on my own time.  
Sure.  We all do the best we can.  None of us are perfect and I have 
never claimed to be either.




If you have, how long did you keep it up without developing
personality issues for lack of sleep, developing dysfunctional
digestion problems like ulcers and diabetes, and/or ending up breaking
up your family?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I do have some of those problems. Some are 
bad enough to where I am probably on medication for the rest of my 
life.  I even have a few others heaped on top of them that you didn't 
mention, like cerebral palsy and arthritis. Actually, cerebral palsy is 
why I got into computers in the first place.


I understand why you asked.  You are probably wondering if I have 
unreasonable expectations of others.  I don't.  I don't expect someone 
like Doug to compile everything from scratch, or you to rebuild Debian 
by yourself.  Conversely, I do expect anyone - myself included - to back 
up what they are saying with good reasons and at least some experience.


I also prefer that in discussions of this nature, that people maintain 
some logical distance - separating the person from the code. Lennart 
Poettering is not systemd and systemd is not Lennart Poettering. If that 
is not possible, then I really see no point in continuing.


A lot of people posting over systemd forget or do not realize a lot of 
important details - for example:


1. Many other people had added and subtracted from the code before you 
or I ever got our hands on it, including Debian.


2. GCC is also a finicky beast, and is hardly bug free.  It  matters 
what compiler is used, even when compiling the kernel, much less 
anything else. You can introduce bugs into software just by using a 
different version of GCC than what the developers are using.


3. The management tools for systemd are written in Python.  I personally 
find it a very questionable choice.  It can be considered famous for 
hard to find runtime bugs.



Take care!
T.J.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

--
Paul E Condon   
pecon...@mesanetworks.net


--- christ...@iwakd.de wrote:

From: Christian Seiler <christ...@iwakd.de>
To: Lisi Reisz <lisi.re...@gmail.com>, debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Another system management tool to disappear.
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:43:00 +0200

On 08/31/2015 05:48 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> On Monday 31 August 2015 16:36:26 The Wanderer wrote:
>> Lennart's proposed alternative (to su)
> 
> After all this discussion, I thought that I ought really to find out what 
> Lennart was proposing, and I must say that it looks remarkably 
> disability-unfriendly. :-(
> 
> For those who have still not discovered, you have to press ^ three times in 
> succession inside a second.

Well, if you want to force-close the session. su/sudo/pkexec don't
support that at all, as far as I know, so while there certainly is room
for improvement when it comes to accessibility (and the formulation of
the message) here, it isn't worse than su/sudo either.

If you want to exit the shell normally, typically the 'exit' command
will suffice (it depends on your shell, obviously).

Christian


On a jessie system, I can interrupt an Emacs file edit session with cntrlZ.
My only self acknowledged disabilities are mild loss of cognitive function and
frequent finger fumbles at the keyboard, so I don't know what a person who 
cannot press-and-hold cntrl and then press Z must do, but surely key entry of
cntrlZ is already a solved problem, but maybe not.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 1:39 PM, T.J. Duchene  wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 10:49 PM, Doug  wrote:
>>
>> That's easy for you to say, since you are obviously a programmer. The rest
>> of us may never have programmed anything, and C just looks like some foreign
>> language --which it is!
>
>
> That's very true, Doug. I have nothing but sympathy for the non-programmer,
> honestly.  You are basically at the mercy of people like myself, and I am
> honestly sorry that that is the case.  I wish it did not require a special
> skill set.  In our defense, however, we have worked long and hard in our
> craft as you have in yours.

Actually, there's a couple or three questions going begging here, that
I'd like to ask:

(1) TJ, have you ever built LFS? Or, even better, built a running OS
on top of the Linux kernel without even the help of the LFS tutorial
and tool set?

(1a) If you have, have you ever implemented your own init system for a
Linux-based OS that you built yourself?

(2) Having done that much, have you ever kept that system maintained
and updated, even at just the level of keeping only the critical
applications patched or updated against vulnerabilities on a timely
basis?

Okay, there's actually one more question here:

(3) Have you ever done the first two while holding down a full-time,
40+ hour a week job that doesn't particularly make allowances for
employees that need to spend the time necessary for maintaining their
OS? If you have, how long did you keep it up without developing
personality issues for lack of sleep, developing dysfunctional
digestion problems like ulcers and diabetes, and/or ending up breaking
up your family?

Answer honestly.

(There is a reason that people get together to make distributions, you know.)

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[tomas]

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On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:19:12PM +0200, Christian Seiler wrote:

Disclaimer: I totally dislike systemd. I'll try to do what it takes
to enjoy a systemd-free Debian. I'm not going to discuss the whys
and hows -- tne Nets are already full of that. That said...

Thanks, Christian, for your level-headed post. I heartily agree
whith you. Let me especially point out:

> It's really sad to see that so many people assume bad faith on the
> other side of an argument, just because you disagree with them.

Let's get back to work. Those wanting systemd: make the best systemd
ever! Those not wanting it: work hard to make life possible without.

Slinging mud at people never helps: Lennart Poettering isn't out there
"to get us" -- he's writing free software. He deserves to be treated
respectfully just for that. Systemd opponents often have their reasons
for their opposition -- they aren't just "parroting" or "averse to
change". They deserve to have their decision respected too.

Let's get along together, m'kay?

Thanks Christian

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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-08-31 at 00:39, T.J. Duchene wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 10:49 PM, Doug 
> wrote:

>> What we would like is stability, and until Poettering started
>> messing with Linux, we pretty much had it--at least in any given
>> distro.
> 
> That's where we part in agreement.  You can't blame Poettering for
> messing with Linux.

We can blame him for his design decisions WRT systemd, the philosophy
behind it, and the attitude with which he pushes it.

systemd's actual functionality, for the most part (various more-or-less
superficial things aside), isn't that bad; a lot of it is actually (at
least potentially) good. It's the compromises in principle that are the
biggest problems, and Lennart simply does not seem to share the
principles which are being compromised.

> The distributor makers looked at systemd and realized that it would
> make things easier for them.  Systemd fills a distributor's need. You
> don't have to like it, but only Debian is responsible for Debian.
> Poettering had no input in that decision, so you should not blame him
> for it.

Debian could not have chosen systemd if Lennart had not written it, and
Debian could not have chosen systemd-in-its-current-form if Lennart had
not designed it in that form, so some layer of the blame does fall on
him.

> Frankly, at no point have I seen Linux become more "unstable"
> because of systemd.  In my experience, Linux as an operating system
> is not horribly stable when you use the bleeding edge releases.  It's
> much better than Windows most of the time, but I would not use even a
> stable Linux in a nuclear reactor.   Linux is not designed for
> extreme stability.

It depends on what kind of stability you're talking about. The init-time
experience with sysvinit and sysvrc has been fairly stable for years, if
not decades; systemd breaks with that stability, in an attempt to
introduce a new paradigm which its developers think is better.


There are plenty of reports of systems which worked just fine with a
given configuration which do not work with that configuration after
being transitioned to systemd; for one easy non-cosmetic example (there
are apparently others), consider the "a failed mount which is not
explicitly marked for failures to be ignored will result in a failed
boot" behavior, which did not occur without systemd but does happen with
systemd.

Yes, you can change your system's configuration to make it work, but in
a stable system you shouldn't have to. (And I'm not talking about
"stable" in the sense of the Debian repository codenames; I'm talking
about 'stable" in the larger sense.)


On a more cosmetic level, without systemd, if you use a "quiet" option
on the kernel command line you will silence kernel output during boot
but not silence service-startup (etc.) option during the later stages of
the bootstrap process - but with systemd, using that option silences
both kernel output _and_ service-startup (etc.) output..

Yes, you can add half-a-dozen-ish systemd-specific options on the kernel
command line to get systemd to display the same combination of output
types as would have happened by default without systemd - but if you
have to change your system configuration in order to get the same
behavior, that system is not behaving in a stable fashion.


Also on a mostly-cosmetic level, if you log in at a text console without
systemd, you will get a certain set of messages, coming mostly from
login and from your shell - but with systemd, logging in at a text
console also produces a mess of extra messages coming from logind, which
are largely irrelevant to whoever just logged in and which step all over
either the original set of messages or the actual shell prompt.

As far as I've been able to determine, there is no way to get logind to
not produce these messages, without also preventing it from producing
messages later - or in background logging - which you might actually
want. And, if I'm interpreting the situation correctly, you will
probably see these messages in your console every time _anyone_ gets a
new "session" on that computer, even if it's not you. This is the
final-straw behavior which led me to reject systemd for my own systems.

(And, no, logind is not systemd-the-PID1-binary - but is part of
systemd-the-collection-of-other-binaries-which-orbit-that-binary, and is
developed by systemd-the-project-which-develops-all-those-binaries. This
is part of the name ambiguity which I was wanting to fix.)


The systemd developers acknowledge the need for some degree of backwards
compatibility, in that they have "support" on some level for
/etc/init.d/ init scripts. However, without _full_ backwards
compatibility on _every_ level - including the cosmetic - being at least
_available for those who want to choose it_ (and preferably being the
default behavior), the behavior seen before a transition to systemd will
be similar enough to the behavior seen after such a transition for the
whole to deserve the 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-08-31 at 03:47, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:19:12PM +0200, Christian Seiler wrote:
> 
> Disclaimer: I totally dislike systemd. I'll try to do what it takes 
> to enjoy a systemd-free Debian. I'm not going to discuss the whys and
> hows -- tne Nets are already full of that. That said...
> 
> Thanks, Christian, for your level-headed post. I heartily agree whith
> you. Let me especially point out:
> 
>> It's really sad to see that so many people assume bad faith on the 
>> other side of an argument, just because you disagree with them.
> 
> Let's get back to work. Those wanting systemd: make the best systemd 
> ever! Those not wanting it: work hard to make life possible without.
> 
> Slinging mud at people never helps: Lennart Poettering isn't out
> there "to get us" -- he's writing free software. He deserves to be
> treated respectfully just for that.

While I understand what you're getting at here, and I believe I agree
with the underlying point, I do not agree with this actual statement.

Some people develop and distribute malware as free software. Do they
deserve to be treated with respect for doing that?

Now, systemd and pulseaudio and the like are not malware - but from some
people's perspectives, much if not all of the software which Lennart
writes and makes available (indeed, actively pushes) is not far short of
being just as undesirable as malware, and it's becoming just as hard to
avoid, albeit for very different reasons.

Also, while I agree that Lennart is not out "to get us" in the sense of
malicious laughter and diabolical plans, he _does_ seem to outright
reject some principles which have been valued in the free-software world
for decades, to want to see those principles crushed to whatever extent
they interfere with his own goals, and to have zero sympathy or respect
in practice for those who do value those principles. The end result may
not be all that different.

If some people decide that writing and pushing software designs which
are actively opposed to their values is not worthy of respect, the fact
that it is free software is not automatically enough to overcome that.

> Systemd opponents often have their reasons for their opposition --
> they aren't just "parroting" or "averse to change". They deserve to
> have their decision respected too.
> 
> Let's get along together, m'kay?

Agreed. For what it's worth, I don't think this particular iteration of
the discussion has gotten nearly as heated or as hostile or as harmful
as many of the previous ones have done.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[tomas]

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On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 08:33:40AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2015-08-31 at 03:47, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

> > Slinging mud at people never helps: Lennart Poettering isn't out
> > there "to get us" -- he's writing free software. He deserves to be
> > treated respectfully just for that.
> 
> While I understand what you're getting at here, and I believe I agree
> with the underlying point, I do not agree with this actual statement.
> 
> Some people develop and distribute malware as free software. Do they
> deserve to be treated with respect for doing that?

So let me correct my instance: I definitely don't assume malice on the
part of Lennart and other systemd people. Just a design taste which is
totally different from mine.

[...]

> Also, while I agree that Lennart is not out "to get us" in the sense of
> malicious laughter and diabolical plans, he _does_ seem to outright
> reject some principles which have been valued in the free-software world
> for decades, to want to see those principles crushed to whatever extent
> they interfere with his own goals, and to have zero sympathy or respect
> in practice for those who do value those principles. The end result may
> not be all that different.

They should -- because now it's a matter of perspectives, and our only
chance to survive that is to accept that. Just leave the respective others
enough room for their perspective.

> If some people decide that writing and pushing software designs which
> are actively opposed to their values is not worthy of respect, the fact
> that it is free software is not automatically enough to overcome that.
> 
> > Systemd opponents often have their reasons for their opposition --
> > they aren't just "parroting" or "averse to change". They deserve to
> > have their decision respected too.
> > 
> > Let's get along together, m'kay?
> 
> Agreed. For what it's worth, I don't think this particular iteration of
> the discussion has gotten nearly as heated or as hostile or as harmful
> as many of the previous ones have done.

And luckily that. It's getting better. Phew :-)

Regards
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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[tomas]

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On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 08:30:58PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

[...]

 Installed it, suid problems:
 
 gene@coyote:~$ busybox su amanda
 su: must be suid to work properly
 gene@coyote:~$ busybox su -
 su: must be suid to work properly
 
 Is it still finding the system su first?

No: It's telling you that it can't honour your request unless the
executable has the setuid bit set. This is the magic by which all
of this works, anyway.

This is easy to achieve (chmod u+s /bin/busybox). BUT you should
stop for a minute and think of the consequences. If busybox has
a vulnerability, then anyone capable of invoking it can achieve
root. Pick your poison :-)

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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[claude juif]

2015-08-29 13:35 GMT+02:00 Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com:

 On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 12:25 AM, claude juif claude.j...@gmail.com
 wrote:
  Hi,
 
  2015-08-28 17:16 GMT+02:00 Renaud OLGIATI 
 ren...@olgiati-in-paraguay.org:
 
  Systemd-Linux to get rid of su:
 
  https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
 
  Is this a trend to make _all_ the GNU-Linux tools disappear, and have
  _everything_
  incorporated into systemd ?
 
 
  Troll mode: ON
 
  What he explains in the blogpost you link make sense. So let's give it a
 try
  ;)

 So, do you mean to say that, when you say the blog post linked to
 makes sense, you are intending to be trolling?


No sorry it was exactly the opposite. I was afraid about a new troll around
systemd.


 --
 Joel Rees

 Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
 Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
 http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 30 August 2015 04:47:10 Reco wrote:

  Hi.

 On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 20:30:58 -0400

 Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:
  On Saturday 29 August 2015 10:39:07 Reco wrote:
Hi.
  
   On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 09:49:55 -0400
  
   Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:
  If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will
  encourage far more people to just give up and run their
  machines as root full time.  And I don't believe for a
  millisecond that is the effect intended.

 They provide some systemd-specific kludge instead of su. So
 it's not that bad.
   
I don't recall recognizing that being discussed yet.
  
   Please read the bugreport. It's all there.
  
   https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825
  
 And, given the current systemd adoption rate in Debian, I'd
 say that we, stable users, have 3-4 years before that
 machinectl login thing will be available to us.

  So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a
  suitable manner that will not bore a hole in the user
  sandbox?

 If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use
 busybox (which has perfectly working implementation of su
 without the fancy bits). I.e.

 busybox su -
   
Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.
  
   Obviously for this command to work it's required to install
   busybox. I'd recommend busybox-static package.
  
   Reco
 
  Installed it, suid problems:
 
  gene@coyote:~$ busybox su amanda
  su: must be suid to work properly
  gene@coyote:~$ busybox su -
  su: must be suid to work properly
 
  Is it still finding the system su first?

 No. The 'problem' is exactly what it tolds. Meaning:

 1) Original su is suid root-owned binary:

 $ ls -la /bin/su
 -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 40168 Nov 21  2014 /bin/su

 2) Busybox, on the other hand - is not:

 $ ls -la /bin/busybox
 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1837008 Feb 19  2015 /bin/busybox


 So, *root*-invoked busybox su should behave exactly like original
 su. Everyone other than root are told to get lost.

 Note that:

 1) Setting suid bit on busybox is *extremely* bad idea. Don't do it
 ever do it (as busybox provides *much* more than su).

 2) Your way of using su you've described should not be affected by
 this little inconvinience as you become root first, and do su second.

 Reco

So to me, nothing changes.  Thats good IMO.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Christian Seiler]

On 08/30/2015 05:00 PM, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
 On 29/08/2015 8:49 AM, T.J. Duchene wrote:
 snip rubbish

Really? Just because you disagree with somebody, their opinion is
rubbish?

 Read Lennart's own blog, you'll see that he is in the business of
 making Linux his own; thus my coined phrase Lennart's Linux.

It's really sad to see that so many people assume bad faith on the
other side of an argument, just because you disagree with them.

It's also quite patronizing to those of us who don't share your
extreme dislike of systemd, because if you think about it: what you are
in fact impliying is that all who are not opposed to it have given up
our free will to a single upstream developer. Do you really want to go
so far and say that?

 And ANYONE whom speaks against systemd is, quite simply, just like one
 who utters the name Voldermort in the Harry Potter story.  Both are
 just as evil, but one is purely fictional.

Again with the rhetoric...

As I said elsewhere in this thread to somebody else: it's fine not to
like systemd, it's fine not to like that Debian made it the default
init system, it's fine not to want to use Debian anymore because of
that, it's fine to express that opinion here.

But seriously, comparing a free software project to a mass-murderer,
even a fictional one? Not OK. (And it doesn't help at all if you are
even remotely interested in convincing people.)

Also, seriously, the other part of the analogy? Do you want me to
remind you what actually happened in the story? The part about people
being utterly terrified for their lives? The part about people who
uttered that name and were caught were physically (!) tortured? Put in
prison? That their families were threatened, sometimes also tortured
and even murdered?

When has something even remotely comparable happened to somebody
opposed to systemd? The worst that has happened was that people got
banned from discussion platforms because of abusive behavior. Nobody
opposed to systemd was ever physically threatened because of their
opinion.

On the contrary: Lennart has received threats to his own life and
well-being because of his work on systemd (and to a presumably
lesser extent also for his work on PulseAudio).

I've seen cases where people working on systemd upstream were very
opinionated and headstrong, even slightly abrasive and dismissive at
times. But I've NEVER seen them stoop to the level of rhetoric that
I've seen in this thread (and others) by opponents of the project -
and given that you aren't threatening anybody, your behavior is very
far from the worst that I've seen coming from those opposed to
systemd.

From that perspective, your analogy reeks of irony.

Christian



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ron]

On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 13:56:18 -0500
T.J. Duchene t.j.duch...@gmail.com wrote:

 If you really have a problem with systemd's design, why don't you take
 the source, fix it and submit the patch?  

Sadly, considering the effort that has been spent (wasted ?) 
developing systemd, the only fix would be to avoid adopting it, 
or later to get rid of it completely
 
Cheers,
 
Ron.
-- 
 Luck, that's when preparation and opportunity meet.
 -- P.E. Trudeau

   -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --
 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[The Wanderer]

On 2015-08-30 at 15:08, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:

 On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 13:56:18 -0500 T.J. Duchene
 t.j.duch...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 If you really have a problem with systemd's design, why don't you
 take the source, fix it and submit the patch?
 
 Sadly, considering the effort that has been spent (wasted ?) 
 developing systemd, the only fix would be to avoid adopting it, or
 later to get rid of it completely

Not to mention that some of the changes which would be necessary to fix
some parts of the design have already been pre-rejected by upstream;
they've specifically and explicitly stated that patches to remove the
interdependencies among the various components will not be accepted.

I don't have a link handy for that, but I could dig one up if it were
really necessary. I don't particularly want to dive as deeply into the
systemd discussion environment as that would require, though.

Plus, at least to all appearances, some of the problems with the design
can pretty much only be fixed by removing features and functionality.
The systemd developers seem to think that those features and that
functionality are worth the cost, so of course they aren't going to
accept patches to remove those things.


Short of that, my own first step in trying to fix systemd would
probably be to disambiguate the names, so that we don't refer to the
binary which gets executed as PID1 _and_ the collection of other
binaries which orbits that binary _and_ the project which develops all
of these binaries by one single undistinguished name. So far as I can
see, no one else seems to have the slightest interest in this.

My second step would probably be to A: clearly define which of the
interfaces involved in the project are internal (and subject to change
without notice) and which are external (and guaranteed to remain
stable in the long term, to be removed or see non-backwards-compatible
changes only with a years-long deprecation process if at all), and B:
define the boundaries in such a way that any interface which one of the
project's modular components uses to communicate with another such
component is considered an external interface.

My reasoning in that latter is more or less as follows:

* In order for a component of a system to be properly considered
modular, it must be possible not only to remove that component without
interfering with the functioning of the rest of the system (except
perhaps by way of explicitly declared dependencies), but to have the
option of replacing it with an alternative component which is developed
and maintained by a third party.

* A third-party tool cannot safely use or depend on an internal
interface of a different project. (I believe even the current systemd
project would agree with this statement.)

* Therefore, either the interfaces between the components are not
internal interfaces, or those components are not modular.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Andrew McGlashan]

On 31/08/2015 1:24 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:
 On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 01:00:27 +1000
 Andrew McGlashan andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au wrote:
 
 And ANYONE whom speaks against systemd is, quite simply, just like one
 who utters the name Voldermort in the Harry Potter story.  Both are
 just as evil, but one is purely fictional.
 
 With due respect, m'lud, it is not he who is evil, who dares utter the name 
 of 
 He Who Must Not Be Named.
 
 HWMNBN, and his followers, are another matter...

Yes, of course, that is what I actually meant ;-)
 - that's the fictional one [HWMNBN].
 - systemd is the non-fictional one
 Just to be clear... both of those evil.

The person whom speaks up against systemd is typically [and most
certainly erroneously] considered a troll.  We are allowed to have an
opinion, even though expressing it is demonized by the pro systemd crowd.

Cheers
A.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ron]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 04:35:46 +1000
Andrew McGlashan andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au wrote:

 The person whom speaks up against systemd is typically [and most
 certainly erroneously] considered a troll.  We are allowed to have an
 opinion, even though expressing it is demonized by the pro systemd crowd.

Common phenomenon: It is well documented that the recently converted are 
the most rabid defenders of their newly-found faith; even though it may be of 
recent creation (For reference, see Scientology)
 
Cheers,
 
Ron.
-- 
 Luck, that's when preparation and opportunity meet.
 -- P.E. Trudeau

   -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --
 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Doug]

On 08/30/2015 03:33 PM, T.J. Duchene wrote:



On 08/30/2015 02:44 PM, The Wanderer wrote:

On 2015-08-30 at 15:08, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:


Sadly, considering the effort that has been spent (wasted ?)
developing systemd, the only fix would be to avoid adopting it, or
later to get rid of it completely

Not to mention that some of the changes which would be necessary to fix
some parts of the design have already been pre-rejected by upstream;
they've specifically and explicitly stated that patches to remove the
interdependencies among the various components will not be accepted.


I honestly doubt most of the people on this list would attempt to upstream a 
patch to the systemd project, even if they had one.   If you personally prefer 
a Linux system sans systemd, it is very possible.



I know this because I have actually built 95% of base Linux from source by hand 
- multiple times  -  over the last 17 years. In my opinion, if you don't want 
to take the effort to do the work, then you simply



ave to accept other's decisions regarding what they compiled in.



/snip/

That's easy for you to say, since you are obviously a programmer. The rest of 
us may never have programmed anything, and C just looks like some foreign 
language --which it is!
What we would like is stability, and until Poettering started messing with 
Linux, we pretty much had it--at least in any given distro.

--doug

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Renaud  OLGIATI
ren...@olgiati-in-paraguay.org wrote:
 Systemd-Linux to get rid of su:

 https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/

 Is this a trend to make _all_ the GNU-Linux tools disappear, and have 
 _everything_
 incorporated into systemd ?

 Cheers,

 Ron.

My interpretation of that blog post ranges from

He's trying to imitate Ted Unangst's doas, but decided sudo isn't
a good enough target.

to

This is more of his attempting to extend the ability of systemd to
completely wrap the kernel.

As a median interpretation, their group has tried to use su for
something they have in their roadmap, recognized the spec puts su
outside their planned use, and is working on a tool similar to su,
which provides a bit more of the fine-grained control they think they
need (and less of the fine-grained control they don't want).

And, because of the way they do things, they are currently selling
their shiny new tool as an alternative to su, which means they may
soon be coming around trying to get support from a lot of young,
ambitious new programmers willing to develop a whole lot of code to
replace a lot of system scripts that use su.

Just more of that re-inventing the wheel thing over there. Since
debian has decided to bring systemd in, it will affect us, but
probably not this year.

Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 5:47 PM, Reco recovery...@gmail.com wrote:
  Hi.

 On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 20:30:58 -0400
 Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:

 On Saturday 29 August 2015 10:39:07 Reco wrote:

   Hi.
 
  On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 09:49:55 -0400
 
  Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:
 If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will
 encourage far more people to just give up and run their machines
 as root full time.  And I don't believe for a millisecond that
 is the effect intended.
   
They provide some systemd-specific kludge instead of su. So it's
not that bad.
  
   I don't recall recognizing that being discussed yet.
 
  Please read the bugreport. It's all there.
 
  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825
 
And, given the current systemd adoption rate in Debian, I'd say
that we, stable users, have 3-4 years before that machinectl
login thing will be available to us.
   
 So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a
 suitable manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?
   
If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
(which has perfectly working implementation of su without the
fancy bits). I.e.
   
busybox su -
  
   Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.
 
  Obviously for this command to work it's required to install busybox.
  I'd recommend busybox-static package.
 
  Reco

 Installed it, suid problems:

 gene@coyote:~$ busybox su amanda
 su: must be suid to work properly
 gene@coyote:~$ busybox su -
 su: must be suid to work properly

 Is it still finding the system su first?

 No. The 'problem' is exactly what it tolds. Meaning:

 1) Original su is suid root-owned binary:

 $ ls -la /bin/su
 -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 40168 Nov 21  2014 /bin/su

 2) Busybox, on the other hand - is not:

 $ ls -la /bin/busybox
 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1837008 Feb 19  2015 /bin/busybox


 So, *root*-invoked busybox su should behave exactly like original
 su. Everyone other than root are told to get lost.

 Note that:

 1) Setting suid bit on busybox is *extremely* bad idea. Don't do it
 ever do it (as busybox provides *much* more than su).

 2) Your way of using su you've described should not be affected by this
 little inconvinience as you become root first, and do su second.

Being curious, myself, about this question, I did a web search on
suid busybox and found this interesting tidbit:

http://www.softforge.de/bb/suid.html

which refers one compile-time configuration, and to a convenient
configuration file:

/etc/busybox.conf

I would assume that, if you have installed busybox, you would have man
pages that explain this, as well. But I don't have a debian system
booted to check, at the moment, sorry. After a search on the web,
maybe it is not easy to find in the man pages, after all.

I must say, my personal impression of busybox has always been that I
would rather simply have enough persistent storage to have a proper
userland -- that it would be indicated only on embedded stuff where
flash RAM and other persistent storage is extremely limited for some
reason or other.

Curt seems to be using it in other ways -- which might be interesting
to hear more about?

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Andrew McGlashan]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA256

On 29/08/2015 8:49 AM, T.J. Duchene wrote:
snip rubbish

Lennart is the /main/ reason systemd exists; vocal or not.

The linux kernel is bloated, it shouldn't be as large IMHO either.  It
too goes against the *NIX way

Read Lennart's own blog, you'll see that he is in the business of
making Linux his own; thus my coined phrase Lennart's Linux.

I want no part of Lennart Linux and I don't want ANY feature creep to
lessen my freedom of choice for any essential component on my systems.

Once you take in systemd, you are going to get to the stage that it
will be necessary whether you like it or not.

And ANYONE whom speaks against systemd is, quite simply, just like one
who utters the name Voldermort in the Harry Potter story.  Both are
just as evil, but one is purely fictional.

Kind Regards
AndrewM
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Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 8:23 PM, claude juif claude.j...@gmail.com wrote:


 2015-08-29 13:35 GMT+02:00 Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com:

 On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 12:25 AM, claude juif claude.j...@gmail.com
 wrote:
  Hi,
 
  2015-08-28 17:16 GMT+02:00 Renaud OLGIATI
  ren...@olgiati-in-paraguay.org:
 
  Systemd-Linux to get rid of su:
 
  https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/
 
  Is this a trend to make _all_ the GNU-Linux tools disappear, and have
  _everything_
  incorporated into systemd ?
 
 
  Troll mode: ON
 
  What he explains in the blogpost you link make sense. So let's give it a
  try
  ;)

 So, do you mean to say that, when you say the blog post linked to
 makes sense, you are intending to be trolling?


 No sorry it was exactly the opposite. I was afraid about a new troll around
 systemd.

Well, where I'm from, troll_mode is a property of the OP, and only the
OP can set it. We might read it between the lines, but we can't
actually set it.

We, after the fact, can assert troll_warning or such, and the least
processor-intensive way to assert that would be to use interweaved
response, with the troll_warning flag above the quoted text.

Lisi might tell me I'm being too pedantic.

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Ron]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 01:00:27 +1000
Andrew McGlashan andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au wrote:

 And ANYONE whom speaks against systemd is, quite simply, just like one
 who utters the name Voldermort in the Harry Potter story.  Both are
 just as evil, but one is purely fictional.

With due respect, m'lud, it is not he who is evil, who dares utter the name of 
He Who Must Not Be Named.

HWMNBN, and his followers, are another matter...
 
Cheers,
 
Ron.
-- 
 C'est bien plus beau lorsque c'est inutile.
   -- Edmond Rostand

   -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --
 

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 11:49:12 +1200
Chris Bannister cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 07:12:32PM +0300, Reco wrote:
  To:
  
  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, ...).
  
  
  I'm kind of surprised that the bug was not closed as WONTFIX. su(1) is
  not a full login, but it's not supposed to provide one anyway.
 
 su - name
 
 Has always worked fine for me. What's the problem?

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825 says:

su[1980]: pam_systemd(su-l:session): Cannot create session: Already
running in a session

Why the bug report implies that pam_systemd shoud create a new
'session' (whatever it means by 'session') *and* set some obscure
environment variables is beyond me. Especially since su(1) directly says
that su should not create session, it should reuse an existing one.

Reco

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 29 August 2015 06:18:56 Reco wrote:

  Hi.

 On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 11:49:12 +1200

 Chris Bannister cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz wrote:
  On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 07:12:32PM +0300, Reco wrote:
   To:
  
   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, ...).
  
  
   I'm kind of surprised that the bug was not closed as WONTFIX.
   su(1) is not a full login, but it's not supposed to provide one
   anyway.
 
  su - name
 
  Has always worked fine for me. What's the problem?

 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825 says:

 su[1980]: pam_systemd(su-l:session): Cannot create session: Already
 running in a session

 Why the bug report implies that pam_systemd shoud create a new
 'session' (whatever it means by 'session') *and* set some obscure
 environment variables is beyond me. Especially since su(1) directly
 says that su should not create session, it should reuse an existing
 one.

 Reco
Now I am again confused.  As the admin for my 4 machine home network, 
there are things that run as other users, so I'll use amanda, the backup 
program as an example here.

In order to adjust any of its configuration, and do it without mucking 
with file ownerships  permissions, I much first do a sudo -i to make me 
an immortal root.  Then I can either su amanda, or su amanda -c geany 
filename so that for the duration of that commands execution, I am the 
user amanda.  Some distro's setup a backup group and make amanda a 
member, but those distro's do not always preserve the amanda tenet of 
running with just enough permissions to get the job done, so I tend to 
steer clear and only install from the tarball.

My web page in the sig is also on this machine, all running in another 
users sandbox, so again to manage that, I have to do the 'become root' 
bit, then edit and keep track of perms with chown/chmod which I can only 
do with the sudo -i phantom roor.

If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will encourage 
far more people to just give up and run their machines as root full 
time.  And I don't believe for a millisecond that is the effect 
intended.
  
So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a suitable 
manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 08:55:00 -0400
Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:

 On Saturday 29 August 2015 06:18:56 Reco wrote:
 
   Hi.
 
  On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 11:49:12 +1200
 
  Chris Bannister cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz wrote:
   On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 07:12:32PM +0300, Reco wrote:
To:
   
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, ...).
   
   
I'm kind of surprised that the bug was not closed as WONTFIX.
su(1) is not a full login, but it's not supposed to provide one
anyway.
  
   su - name
  
   Has always worked fine for me. What's the problem?
 
  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825 says:
 
  su[1980]: pam_systemd(su-l:session): Cannot create session: Already
  running in a session
 
  Why the bug report implies that pam_systemd shoud create a new
  'session' (whatever it means by 'session') *and* set some obscure
  environment variables is beyond me. Especially since su(1) directly
  says that su should not create session, it should reuse an existing
  one.
 

 Now I am again confused.  As the admin for my 4 machine home network, 
 there are things that run as other users, so I'll use amanda, the backup 
 program as an example here.

Welcome to the club. I'm confused by this bugreport too.


 In order to adjust any of its configuration, and do it without mucking 
 with file ownerships  permissions, I much first do a sudo -i to make me 
 an immortal root.  Then I can either su amanda, or su amanda -c geany 
 filename so that for the duration of that commands execution, I am the 
 user amanda.  Some distro's setup a backup group and make amanda a 
 member, but those distro's do not always preserve the amanda tenet of 
 running with just enough permissions to get the job done, so I tend to 
 steer clear and only install from the tarball.
 
 My web page in the sig is also on this machine, all running in another 
 users sandbox, so again to manage that, I have to do the 'become root' 
 bit, then edit and keep track of perms with chown/chmod which I can only 
 do with the sudo -i phantom roor.

Kind of old-fashioned for my taste (I'd use 'sudo -u' in the first
place), but perfectly sane approach.


 If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will encourage 
 far more people to just give up and run their machines as root full 
 time.  And I don't believe for a millisecond that is the effect 
 intended.

They provide some systemd-specific kludge instead of su. So it's not
that bad.
And, given the current systemd adoption rate in Debian, I'd say that
we, stable users, have 3-4 years before that machinectl login thing
will be available to us.

   
 So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a suitable 
 manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?

If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
(which has perfectly working implementation of su without the fancy
bits). I.e.

busybox su - 

Reco

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Joel Rees]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 12:25 AM, claude juif claude.j...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi,

 2015-08-28 17:16 GMT+02:00 Renaud OLGIATI ren...@olgiati-in-paraguay.org:

 Systemd-Linux to get rid of su:

 https://tlhp.cf/lennart-poettering-su/

 Is this a trend to make _all_ the GNU-Linux tools disappear, and have
 _everything_
 incorporated into systemd ?


 Troll mode: ON

 What he explains in the blogpost you link make sense. So let's give it a try
 ;)

So, do you mean to say that, when you say the blog post linked to
makes sense, you are intending to be trolling?

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Brian]

On Sat 29 Aug 2015 at 08:55:00 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

[Snip]

 So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a suitable 
 manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?

su is not going away. Please take no notice of the misinformation being
spread in the first post and read

  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825  

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 29 August 2015 09:24:52 Reco wrote:

  Hi.

 On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 08:55:00 -0400

 Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:
  On Saturday 29 August 2015 06:18:56 Reco wrote:
Hi.
  
   On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 11:49:12 +1200
  
   Chris Bannister cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz wrote:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 07:12:32PM +0300, Reco wrote:
 To:

 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, ...).


 I'm kind of surprised that the bug was not closed as WONTFIX.
 su(1) is not a full login, but it's not supposed to provide
 one anyway.
   
su - name
   
Has always worked fine for me. What's the problem?
  
   https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825 says:
  
   su[1980]: pam_systemd(su-l:session): Cannot create session:
   Already running in a session
  
   Why the bug report implies that pam_systemd shoud create a new
   'session' (whatever it means by 'session') *and* set some obscure
   environment variables is beyond me. Especially since su(1)
   directly says that su should not create session, it should reuse
   an existing one.
 
  Now I am again confused.  As the admin for my 4 machine home
  network, there are things that run as other users, so I'll use
  amanda, the backup program as an example here.

 Welcome to the club. I'm confused by this bugreport too.

  In order to adjust any of its configuration, and do it without
  mucking with file ownerships  permissions, I much first do a sudo
  -i to make me an immortal root.  Then I can either su amanda, or
  su amanda -c geany filename so that for the duration of that
  commands execution, I am the user amanda.  Some distro's setup a
  backup group and make amanda a member, but those distro's do not
  always preserve the amanda tenet of running with just enough
  permissions to get the job done, so I tend to steer clear and only
  install from the tarball.
 
  My web page in the sig is also on this machine, all running in
  another users sandbox, so again to manage that, I have to do the
  'become root' bit, then edit and keep track of perms with
  chown/chmod which I can only do with the sudo -i phantom roor.

 Kind of old-fashioned for my taste (I'd use 'sudo -u' in the first
 place), but perfectly sane approach.

ISTR I read that someplace, tried it, but it needed a root password, 
which does not exist on any of these machines, hence the two stage 
approach to getting the job done.

  If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will
  encourage far more people to just give up and run their machines as
  root full time.  And I don't believe for a millisecond that is the
  effect intended.

 They provide some systemd-specific kludge instead of su. So it's not
 that bad.

I don't recall recognizing that being discussed yet.

 And, given the current systemd adoption rate in Debian, I'd say that
 we, stable users, have 3-4 years before that machinectl login thing
 will be available to us.

  So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a suitable
  manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?

 If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
 (which has perfectly working implementation of su without the fancy
 bits). I.e.

 busybox su -

Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.

Thanks.

 Reco


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 29 August 2015 09:49:55 Gene Heskett wrote:

 On Saturday 29 August 2015 09:24:52 Reco wrote:
   Hi.

[...]

  Kind of old-fashioned for my taste (I'd use 'sudo -u' in the first
  place), but perfectly sane approach.

 ISTR I read that someplace, tried it, but it needed a root password,
 which does not exist on any of these machines, hence the two stage
 approach to getting the job done.

So I just now played some more, and did make it work.  Its an option that 
ought to be better explained in the man page.

Thank you, I learned something today.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Curt]

On 2015-08-29, Reco recovery...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/busybox
 
 Spooned.

 https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/busybox-static

 'busybox' in Debian is dynamically-linked, which kind of defeats the
 purpose of the busybox. So - 'busybox-static'.

 Reco

Ah ok.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Curt]

On 2015-08-29, Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:

 If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
 (which has perfectly working implementation of su without the fancy
 bits). I.e.

 busybox su -

 Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.


https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/busybox

Spooned.

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 14:27:37 + (UTC)
Curt cu...@free.fr wrote:

 On 2015-08-29, Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:
 
  If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
  (which has perfectly working implementation of su without the fancy
  bits). I.e.
 
  busybox su -
 
  Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.
 
 
 https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/busybox
 
 Spooned.

https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/busybox-static

'busybox' in Debian is dynamically-linked, which kind of defeats the
purpose of the busybox. So - 'busybox-static'.

Reco

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 29 August 2015 09:29:47 Brian wrote:

 On Sat 29 Aug 2015 at 08:55:00 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

 [Snip]

  So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a suitable
  manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?

 su is not going away. Please take no notice of the misinformation
 being spread in the first post and read

   https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825

Well, if it did, I wonder how long it will be before someone replaces all 
that typing with a script named su?  There are far more ways to skin 
that cat than the cats supposedly nine lives can account for.

That is not written in jest. I have automated quite a few of the daily 
ditch digging tasks on this machine so that when something see's a 
trigger, there's a bash script, launched as a daemon, waiting to handle 
it, all in the background, often without making me even aware of it. It 
just gets done.

That is after all, one of the things computers should be good at, so I 
use the heck out of its ability to save me keystrokes or button clicks.

For instance, to reply to this mail which showed up already sorted to the 
correct folder as if by magic, all I have to do is click the correct 
reply button.  And click on send, or ctl+return when I am done.  
Litterally everything else is done for me by scripts that tie mailfilter 
and fetchmail, feeding procmail, which in turn checks that mail with 
spamassassin, clamscan  feeds the survivors to /var/spool/mail/$user.
The closing of that file triggers another script that tells kmail to go 
get the new mail from that local inbox.  So kmail doesn't go to sleep 
for 30 seconds while I am in the middle of typing a reply, a fraction of 
a second is all.

Whats not to like?

Another furinstance. I have a 30 yo computer setup in the basement that 
I yet do software development on in the wintertime.  I run a java app 
that hooks it up to this machine, so I can have a file here that looks 
like a whole drive to that machine, up to 100's of them in fact.  Or if 
I want to print a listing of some of my assembly language scribblings, 
the printer driver in its os has been swapped out for one that uses one 
of the channels this java app, called drivewire has, so I list filename 
/p, and this machine does all the work, spitting out that listing at 
19 pages a minute on a small Brother laser printer that actually lives 
on the desk that computer is sitting on.  All tied together with a 
lng USB cable, and done automatically and 20x faster by this 
machine. Also much easier to read than the old dot matrix printers that 
machine once drove.

That is what computers are supposed to do.  So I have no qualms about 
making them do it.  It gives me more time to be creative in other ways.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Reco]

 Hi.

On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 09:49:55 -0400
Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:

   If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will
   encourage far more people to just give up and run their machines as
   root full time.  And I don't believe for a millisecond that is the
   effect intended.
 
  They provide some systemd-specific kludge instead of su. So it's not
  that bad.
 
 I don't recall recognizing that being discussed yet.

Please read the bugreport. It's all there.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825

 
  And, given the current systemd adoption rate in Debian, I'd say that
  we, stable users, have 3-4 years before that machinectl login thing
  will be available to us.
 
   So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a suitable
   manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?
 
  If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
  (which has perfectly working implementation of su without the fancy
  bits). I.e.
 
  busybox su -
 
 Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.

Obviously for this command to work it's required to install busybox.
I'd recommend busybox-static package.

Reco

Re: Another system management tool to disappear.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 29 August 2015 10:39:07 Reco wrote:

  Hi.

 On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 09:49:55 -0400

 Gene Heskett ghesk...@wdtv.com wrote:
If su goes away, IMNSHO, it will be such a PITA that it will
encourage far more people to just give up and run their machines
as root full time.  And I don't believe for a millisecond that
is the effect intended.
  
   They provide some systemd-specific kludge instead of su. So it's
   not that bad.
 
  I don't recall recognizing that being discussed yet.

 Please read the bugreport. It's all there.

 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/825

   And, given the current systemd adoption rate in Debian, I'd say
   that we, stable users, have 3-4 years before that machinectl
   login thing will be available to us.
  
So, if su goes away,  how do I accomplish those tasks in a
suitable manner that will not bore a hole in the user sandbox?
  
   If it comes to this (i.e 'su' will go away) - I just use busybox
   (which has perfectly working implementation of su without the
   fancy bits). I.e.
  
   busybox su -
 
  Command not found. Wheezy 32 bit install.

 Obviously for this command to work it's required to install busybox.
 I'd recommend busybox-static package.

 Reco

Installed it, suid problems:

gene@coyote:~$ busybox su amanda
su: must be suid to work properly
gene@coyote:~$ busybox su -
su: must be suid to work properly

Is it still finding the system su first?

Thanks

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene