wonderingwandererIsn’t the whole point of FOSS software that anyone can fork it?
3abasYou can fork it. Are you gonna maintain your fork? Is your fork going to be adopted by the majority of distributions?
Mine won’t certainly, but by the magic of FOSS I’m sure someone will do it.
Oh look, someone already has…
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.
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.
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.
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 no one is…
sudo-rs is not a fork.
alososudo-rs is a complete re-implementation, not a fork. Also, sudo-rs was not created by Ubuntu. 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.
sudo and su
The Story The sudo and su utilities mediate a critical privilege boundary on just about every open source operating system that powers the Internet. Unfortunately, these utilities have a long history of memory safety issues. By rewriting sudo and su in Rust we can make sure they don't suffer from any more memory safety vulnerabilities. By leaving out infrequently used features we can reduce attack surface. What We've Done In December of 2022 we funded a joint development effort between Tweede Golf and Ferrous Systems to rewrite sudo and su in Rust.