Sudo's maintainer needs resources to keep utility updated
www.theregister.com
updated: Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals

It’s hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.

Archived version

  • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
    21·
    18 hours ago

    Funding or not, Miller expects sudo-rs to become the next generation of the tool in coming years.

    “Ubuntu is already shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo command in their latest versions,” Miller told us. “I’ve been in contact with the people working on sudo-rs since the project started and I trust them to do right by the sudo user base.”

    Projects don’t last forever, and when they inevitably end, it’s an opportunity to switch to something newer and hopefully better. Sudo coming to an end, if it does, will just force people onto alternatives.

    Being open source, sudo will always exist, whether someone else wants to maintain it, fork it, use it as-is, or just reference it. It’s because it’s open source that it can serve a purpose even beyond its EOL.

    Anyway, sudo’s not dead yet, so there’s still plenty of time for people to look at what’s out there. Some distros have already moved to, or are considering moving to, alternatives like sudo-rs, so I’d expect that to continue.

    • Drew@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      10 hours ago

      sudo-rs might never be adopted as a default in many distros precisely because it’s in rust. or rust adoption gets better and better to the point that it runs everywhere.

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        5 hours ago

        Rust shouldn’t be an issue IMO. Any rust libraries used are statically linked, only the good ol’ C and C++ (if any) libraries it depends on would have to be dependencies to the package. So it should theoretically offer fewer issues with dependencies than the original sudo.

          • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
            2·
            2 hours ago

            Technically yes, but all the common ones are covered. I don’t think any mainstream distros support anything so exotic that Rust doesn’t compile for it. Gentoo supports Alpha and HPPA which haven’t been around since the 90s, those are the only architectures that Gentoo has sudo packages for, that Rust doesn’t support. Your run of the mill distros don’t support anything this exotic. Common everyday architectures we see all the time in our daily lives like SPARC, PowerPC or RISC-V are supported.

        • Drew@sopuli.xyz
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I would love sudo-rs to be GPL but that’s orthogonal to the fact of it being bundled in distros. It’s still FOSS