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

    • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
      241·
      2 days ago

      The article points out that sudo has already been forked by Ubuntu maintainer canonical into sudo-rs which reimplements sudo in rust with better memory protections. It also states that the maintainer of sudo expects sudo-rs to be the future of sudo.

      • aloso@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        5·
        22 hours ago

        sudo-rs is a complete re-implementation, not a fork. Also, sudo-rs was not created by Canonical. It was created by Tweede Golf and Ferrous System with funding from Prossimo. Since 2024 it is being maintained by the Trifecta Tech Foundation. Ubuntu merely packages it.

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        2 days ago

        That’s good, at least everything won’t collapse catastrophically at this like a single point of failure without any redundancies. It would be better if someone other than canonical would do it, but at least it’s not like no one is…

    • 3abas@lemmy.world
      14·
      2 days ago

      You can fork it. Are you gonna maintain your fork? Is your fork going to be adopted by the majority of distributions?

        • 3abas@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 day ago

          What do you mean someone already has? As of this comment it has 268 forks on GitHub.

          Creating a fork takes one click, and doesn’t mean anyone will adopt it. Maintaining a codebase is not as simple as “magic of FOSS”, someone has to dedicate their time to it.

          • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
            11·
            17 hours ago

            Okay, that’s a lot of someones. That doesn’t contradict “someone has forked it.” You’re being unnecessarily assy.

            As per other comments, sudo-rs exists and is being maintained. And that’s the magic of FOSS.

            Although it’s apparently not a fork. But it’s still a workable substitute, and that’s what matters. My entire point was that the entire Linux ecosystem isn’t going to be fucked just because one guy dies or decides to stop maintaining a widely used codebase.