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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> They wrote the program in C

They wrote it in 1980 for unix; what exactly would you like them to have used?

> (as far as I can tell) have no intention of rewriting it in Rust

Since it will be less than a paragraph before you start ranting about how "obscure targets that nobody uses won't be able to leech off of the rest of the ecosystem by holding back any chance to let us have a modicum of nice things", I trust you, who would surely never be a "leech", have written an actual replacement or submitted patches to start improving the situation? Or perhaps are funding such efforts?

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I did write an actual replacement. It's what TFA is about :)

> I did write an actual replacement. It's what TFA is about :)

That is obviously not a replacement; either we take the serious approach of "sudo allows only authorized users to run things as root" and yours doesn't control access, or we take the nonserious approach of "sudo has so many bugs that it just gives people access" in which case we hardly need to bother rewriting it.

to me the solution seems fairly obvious, and as is tradition already exists in unix as groups.

sudo is for people who need root access. if you need anything less then create a custom group and assign the relevant specific rights there.

And then use su or whatever to control access to the actual root account? You'll always need some amount of access to it, although I suppose you're correct that in a truly well-functioning system it would be needed much less since everybody would be in enough groups to get access to the stuff they actually need.

exactly

I just like sudo as a sanity checker — if I need it for some random command I stop and figure out why it needs root privileges.

The amount of times I’ve seen:

  wget random_script.sh && chmod +x random_script.sh
  sudo ./random_script.sh

Yesn't.

Because the entire value-prop of sudo is ubiquity and mindshare. There are as many replacements for sudo as there are Rust developers. Any one of them is probably fine.

The hard part is solving the coordination problem among millions of humans to just pick one and standardize on it. All that work is eliminated in an instant if you just convince the sudo maintainers to bless and ship one.

>They wrote it in 1980 for unix; what exactly would you like them to have used?

Pascal

Huh. I didn't think there was Pascal for Unix back then, but apparently there was:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200614183924/http://www.grokla...

So yes, actually, that might have been possible, and if so it probably would have been better than C.

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