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Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support (www.theregister.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] 92 points 7 months ago (11 children)

It’s been 12 years since Heartbleed and we’ve had numerous ”lone maintainer” issues since then. The situation shouldn’t come as a surprise or be especially ”hard to believe”.

This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.

Unless the creators manage to roll some kind of ”commercial” version, it’s not very sustainable in the long run. Turns out many eyes don’t really equal many PRs

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  • [–] 50 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (8 children)

    This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.

    The state of free software also includes the fact that even if the sudo maintainer doesn't find support, no one steps up and sudo becomes unmaintained, sudo-rs, doas, opendoas, run0 and please already exist as alternatives.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    and let's not forget - systemd, which has RedHat money backing it up.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Hope you don't see who pays for kernel development…

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Why? I'm not against developers getting paid to do FOSS work. It's far more reasonable than the whole "bazaar of free people"-model that lives entirely on ideology.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    hang on, there's one called please? Are there any downsides with using please instead of sudo?

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    From what I can see, it's a sudo clone with added optional regex functionality, written in Rust.
    So you can use it just like sudo, or you can limit superuser rights to directory names that contain a 💩 emoji, but only on Mondays.

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  • [–] 26 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    In my experience a lot of these old projects really go out of their way to dissuade contributions anyway. Lots of naysaying "it's always been like that", ancient infrastructure - e.g. insisting on git send-email patches, etc.

    Usually the only way it gets resolved is when someone writes a more modern competitor and it starts gaining traction. Suddenly all those improvements that people tried to do and were told were impossible and stupid aren't such a bad idea after all.

    I don't think that's the case with Unity but it probably is with things like GCC, sudo, sysvinit, X11, etc.

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