Why would one prefer to add sudoedit X to sudoers rather than updating file access privileges of X directly?
Just curious about arguments for this use case.
Just curious about arguments for this use case.
Permission complications.
Software may run as user:group, but you don't want to add humans to either, and so you allow them to edit a few files as that user or group from their own account (which also gives you auditing of changes). Some software insists on files (directories) have certain permissions so you're stuff with them.
Or you want a centralized place for permissions, so you put these sudoedit entries in LDAP which can be accessed anywhere in you network, and so you don't have to keep track of individual file permissions on a gazillion systems.
As to why you can't just update access privileges of the file, for most use cases you probably could do that. If you need something more complicated though you'll have to use some terrible ACL implementation like the one in sudo or Posix file ACLs.
The /etc/sudoers solution does have a usability advantage precisely in not being smeared all over the system. Even if “/etc/sudoers” and “usability” are words not often seen inside a single sentence.
I mean, ACL data is normally stored in filesysem metadata, nothing is 'smeared'.