On the surface, sudo seems fairly straightforward, so it’s interesting to hear how much work has gone into it! Do you have any interesting facts or anecdotes you’d care to share?
It's so great to be able to listen and learn from the people that invented these important building blocks themselves, I feel lucky. Thanks for sharing.
`su` is straightforward, `sudo` is a very powerful piece of software and the configuration has a lot of edge cases.
The sudoers grammar will be described below in Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). Don’t despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF; it is fairly simple, and the definitions below are annotated.
OpenBSD replaced sudo with their own "doas" command a few years ago; the doas.conf manual page is about 100 lines; sudoers is over 2,000.