GNU bug report logs -
#10317
patch to su: -l and -p should not be used together
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Reported by: Rocky Bernstein <rocky <at> gnu.org>
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 22:29:01 UTC
Severity: normal
Done: Assaf Gordon <assafgordon <at> gmail.com>
Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.
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Rocky Bernstein wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net> wrote:
>
> Rocky Bernstein wrote:
> > It's been a couple of months since I first sent this was sent without nary
> > an ack. Comments?
>
> Hi Rocky,
>
> su is barely on life support in coreutils.
> Meaning that it's no longer really maintained.
> We stopped installing it (by default) back in the 2007-2008
> time frame (6.9.90, 7.0). We nearly removed it altogether.
>
> Do you build/install coreutils yourself, or use it via a distribution?
> If the latter, which distribution?
>
> CenOS 6.2 which seems to use coreutils 8.4
>
> I don't remember looking carefully at your patch before,
> but glanced through it just now. Here are some suggestions
> if you'd like to pursue it:
>
> - use "error (0, 0, ...", not fprintf (
> - indent with spaces, not TABs
> - use gnu indentation/formatting style (esp. wrt braces)
> - mention the change in NEWS
> - for a behavior change like this, we would like a test case
>
> The above seems all reasonable and easily doable. But are you suggesting is even
> after getting this into the next coreutils, no OS is likely to use it?
>
> The basic idea is that a colleague and I were confused by the fact that -l and
> -p conflict although this was not apparent in the documentation. I wound up
> downloading the source code to understand fully.
>
> So something even as simple as mentioning this in doc/coreutils.texi would have
> been helpful (which is the first part of that patch).
>
> Going further I realized that it is probably erroneous to supply both -l -p and
> that can be easily warned.
>
> But if there is a better place such to report such problems or get code
> improved, let me know! Thanks.
I see that Fedora still uses su from coreutils, too,
so this is a worthwhile change.
This bug report was last modified 6 years and 281 days ago.
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