this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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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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[โ€“] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 16 points 9 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.

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.