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

[Jim Meyering]

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.