Was sudo broken in some way that makes rewriting it in rust appealing? Genuinely curious.
Its a big debate/ discussion lately, as rust has some safety bits built-in that make it safer than C. So tools are getting ported.
I mean…sounds fine. Why is it “controversial”?
Few reasons, some less valid than others.
- replaces GPL license with more permissive one
- wasnt broke dont fix
- missing some configuration features of base sudo
- C people feeling threatened by rust
- people hate rust’s overzealous stans
- rust community is pretty queer, so being anti-rust is a nice proxy for anti-lgbtq
replaces GPL license with more permissive one
Honestly I think this is a rather big deal. It leaves our project open to just being made closed source / justifies not contributing back from big companies.
- wasnt broke dont fix
Sadly, security issues are still being found in sudo, so wasn’t broke isn’t entirely true. Though, whether or not Rust prevents a given security issue is strongly dependent on the kind of issue. Security issues arising from logical errors usually don’t get caught, there is only a guarantee for memory management issues.
- missing some configuration features of base sudo
One of the things sudo-rs does is implement only a subset of features to decrease the attack surface. A recent security issue did not affect sudo-rs because they simply did not implement the feature that had the (logic) bug. As with many things this is a trade-off.
Just GreyBeards having discussions, sometimes heated. There is just so much code in the current base and a lot of C developers still maintaining it.
Everyone is focusing on the fact that this us C vs rust. The original sudo has issues on its own. Its a large code base that does lots of things and has inherent security vulnerabilities.
Sudo is worth redoing regardless of language.
https://linuxsecurity.com/news/security-vulnerabilities/sudo-flaws-linux-privilege-at-risk
Honestly - even if there were no other practical benefit to the code base - having a new language to recode everything in is healthy for programmers - it gets newer engineers excited.
Hurray the codebase is rusting e.g. becomes brittle. Whoever came up with that languages name didn’t really think it through.
It’s worse than that. Rust is named after a Fungal infection known for being unstoppable.
Do you hve to write sudo-rs ?
No you sudon’t.
No. Still sudo
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