removing "su" from coreutils [Re: Fwd: [PULL] su

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [PULL] su
> Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 14:58:01 +0200
> From: Ludwig Nussel <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
>
> Hi,
>
> coreutils isn't really interested in maintaining su anymore.
> Distributions have to add custom patches to fix bugs and add
> features. The worst offender is probably the pam patch. Fortunately
> we managed to sync the patch between openSUSE and Fedora meanwhile.
> Over time the risk that the patches divert again increases though.
> Since util-linux now contains a common login program it looks like a
> good new home for su too.
>
> To integrate su into util-linux I've extracted the history of the su
> program until the last GPLv2 version (they've changed to GPLv3
> meanwhile) from coreutils' git and merged it with util-linux.
> Then I've added the patches used in Fedora and openSUSE and fixed the
> files to actually build.
>
> You can find the result in branch su-v1 (ff6b15d) at
> address@hidden:lnussel/util-linux.git
>
> I've also filed a pull request on github:
> https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/pull/10
>
> Originally I had planned to implement separate tty allocation for
> the child program on top of that to get rid of the evil setsid
> patch. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought though. The
> change would be too massive to backport anyways I guess. So the next
> step would be to rip out the non-pam legacy stuff and clean up the code
> to make it readable again.

Hi Pádraig,

Thanks for forwarding that.

I would like to remove su.c, if/when possible from coreutils.
The last time I proposed that, the Hurd was mentioned as a
reason not to, since they relied on the su from coreutils.

Is that still the case, and if so, can you (the Hurd) switch
to the one from util-linux?