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Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support (www.theregister.com)

submitted 14 hours ago by randomname@scribe.disroot.org to c/programming@programming.dev

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] 0xtero@beehaw.org 67 points 13 hours ago (2 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

[–] mech@feddit.org 29 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 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.

[–] 0xtero@beehaw.org 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] srestegosaurio@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 19 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] srestegosaurio@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago

I think that's at least a big part of it. There's so much unnecessary friction in legacy projects that, while understandable to a degree, sucks.