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Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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This will probably lead to vocal outrage because it's Systemd rather than an alternative project coming up with the solution.
Sudo has long known to have dangerous weaknesses, but it's generally been accepted since sudo solves a bunch of other problems. If we can fix the problems sudo has, then that's a good thing. Would be nicer if we could split up some of these projects though to stop uber projects.
The outrage is that the solution is to suck the feature into an already massive project built to replace initd and has absorbed several other services (syslog, logind, crond), creating dependencies along the way.
systemd will be superceded, like pulseaudio, because it has an awful design. It'll just be a lot more work for distros to replace because of all the other services it's absorbed. Hopefully by then Poettering will have retired and stopped inflicting his software in people. The problem isn't his initial offerings; those are rather good and solve a problem well. Good enough that distros adopt it. It's just that he can't resist feature envy and bloat, and once a distro has a dependency on his solution, the bloat comes along and it's more work to switch away than just let the bloat take over.
Edit: "superseded?" Where were you when I needed you, autocorrect?
The reason systemd absorbs other services is because it's trying to make a proper integrated OS userland. Having a load of separate components that don't really know anything about each other kiiind of works, but it's super janky.
For example Windows has supported a secure attention key sequence (ctrl-alt-del) for literal decades. Linux still doesn't support this very basic - and critical for shared computing environments like schools - feature, because it requires coordinating X11 and logind and the kernel and god knows what else and they simply aren't properly integrated.
The systemd hatred strongly reminds me of when Xorg started automating the config and you no longer needed xfree86config. You didn't need to manually write mode lines and tell X that your mouse had 3 buttons, and some people did not like that.
Yes it sounds completely insane that people wouldn't like this obvious improvement where things used to require tedious manual configuration and now they worked automatically but some people really didn't I promise! My theory is that it's because a) it made their hard won knowledge obsolete, making them less smart relatively, and b) they resented the fact that they had to go through the pain but new people wouldn't and that isn't fair.
Seems similar with systemd. I would like my laptop to sleep properly please.
Also I have actually read some of the sudo source code. There's absolutely no way that code should be SUID. Insane.