bug#10317: PING - bug#10317: patch to su: -l and -p should not be used together

[Rocky Bernstein]

Any progress or thoughts on the revised patch?

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Rocky Bernstein <address@hidden> wrote:

> Attached should be a revised patch that addresses all of your suggestions.
>
> Cheers,
>    rocky
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Rocky Bernstein wrote:
>>
>> > On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> 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.
>>
>
>