Control: tags -1 + wontfix upstream Hello anna,
Thanks for your bug report. On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 01:02:41AM -0500, anna wrote: [...] > The man page for su says the following: "It is recommended to always > use the --login option (instead of its shortcut -)". > To me that doesn't make sense, they should be equivalent, and this is > confirmed (and adds to the confusion) when I scroll down and the > options -, -l, and --login are all listed as doing the exact same > things. They are equivalent. A different wording might be: "using GNU style command line options are recommended", without also saying "non-GNU style command line options are deprecated and might be removed at some point" ... because 'su -' is just to widespread both among users, scripts and online writings so that even though parsing would be greatly simplified without the legacy alternative it's likely not practically possible to drop it, fix everything and retrain users. Many people doesn't even know about the GNU style alternative to the legacy '-' option that exists for compatibility with legacy UNIX, which I guess is why the man-page makes an attempt to start educating people even though it seems quite a futile task. I'm marking this as wonfix, because I don't really see a problem with the current writing and even if there was this something which should be discussed and changed upstream if it should be changed. IOW it's not a debian-specific problem. Regards, Andreas Henriksson
