No user is able to su to root unless a wheel group is added to the /etc/group file, and users are added to the group. I'm using wheel to be a second gid 0 group (group root is the first one), but it appears that it could be any gid (it works with 1002, for example). I realize this is standard behavior for BSD style su, but there's no mention of the wheel group in the man page. If I were fixing this bug, I'd either add a default group of wheel, or have the source for su look for group root instead of wheel.
You mean a wheel group with gid 0?
It works as long as there is a group called wheel, regardless of what gid it is. Traditionally in BSD it's gid 0 (and there's no group named root), but it doesn't seem to matter to su if wheel is some other gid.
we should have a default group of wheel. Yes, we do. marking as "worksforme"