Bug#823660: initscripts: Restore locked root account access by using sulogin --force

[Benda Xu]

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Henriksson <andreas at fatal.se> writes:

> On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 05:47:03PM +0800, Benda Xu wrote:
> [...]
>> I think it a common Debian practice to set root passwords.  Disabling
>> root login and put everything on `sudo` feels very Ubuntu. 
>
> The debian-installer supports both things out of the box equally.
> (Although very few people seem to pay any attention to the root
> password prompt and thus it's quite common people don't know this.)
> Ubuntu only does locked-root-account, and I think there are well
> established reasons to do so and wish it would be more obvious to
> Debian users how d-i works. I don't really see the point in comparing
> to others though. Debian should do what's best for Debian.
>
>> Therefore I think you are right saying "it was 'closed' by moving to
>> util-linux sulogin".
> [...]
>
> I'm personally absolutely not an advocate of passwordless root shells,
> but in my view for sysvinit it's very important to not break legacy
> setups. Specially when most users will not realize until they're
> doing disaster recovery and will get a not obvious situation that's
> just a dead end for them.
>
> If you think breaking this decades worth of how it has worked is ok,
> then I guess that's up to you.
> I personally mostly want to avoid being blamed for having broken it
> myself, through the move to util-linux sulogin. I've offered my
> assistance in getting it fixed, but if you opt out then I'm ok
> with your decision.
> OTOH this absolutely doesn't make sysvinit secure to use in a kiosk
> setup, so I don't see anything won by breaking the old setup.

Thank you for your patience and nice explanation.  I do not think we
should impose surprises to the long-term Debian users.

Therefore, I reserve my view and don't object to adding `--force` to
`sulogin`.  I will chop that option off my setup locally instead.

Cheers,
Benda