[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#826003: login: su(1) man page should document that su may not work at boot time

[Vincent Lefevre]

Package: login
Version: 1:4.2-3.1
Severity: minor

I've used "su some_user -c some_command" for years at boot time,
with sysvinit and more recently with systemd. But starting with
systemd 230, this no longer works due to the (undocumented)
dependency on PAM/dbus (PAM is just mentioned for -m and -p).

It should be documented that su may not work at boot time, at least
until dbus is available. And runuser should be suggested.

In <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825995>,
Michael Biebl says:

  You are involving the pam stack here at a point when dbus is not
  available yet. So this is a misconfiguration of sorts.

  I think you really want runuser instead of su here.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.5.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages login depends on:
ii  libaudit1       1:2.5.2-1
ii  libc6           2.22-9
ii  libpam-modules  1.1.8-3.2
ii  libpam-runtime  1.1.8-3.2
ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.2

login recommends no packages.

login suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information