Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

I'm not a fan of sudo. It's does so much it needs BNF to describe it's configuration format. Who knows, maybe replacing the configuration with polkit is a good idea. Still it's a stand alone binary with one clear job to do, simple enough that one person has no trouble getting their head around it so it's not surprising it hasn't had too many problems over it's long life time.

This made me smile:

> sudo has serious problems though. It's a relatively large SUID binary, i.e. privileged code that unprivileged users can invoke from their own context. It has a complicating configuration language, loadable plugins (ldap!), hostname matches and so on and so on.

That is a bit rich coming from the author of systemd, which must be in the running for one of the largest bodies of code that must run as root. It's also a very complex piece of code. That complexity is the reason I was completely flummoxed by interactions between systemd and dll's being exploited by the XZ utils hack to attack an unrelated and uncompromised binary: openssh. Run0 is just an extension of that ball of mud. It's a stretch to believe it will be more secure than sudo in the long term, which is amusing because it appears Lennarts primary argument is it will be more secure.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this: https://lwn.net/Articles/971812/

Regarding your first point: some people agree, most notably the OpenBSD people who did something about it and wrote “doas” as a replacement; which fits the most common use-cases of sudo without fanfare.

And, as LP points out, fails to solve the actual problem because it's still locked into the exact same flawed Unix model, and refuses to integrate with anything else in the system to get things done in a better more systematic way. It's just a slightly refined version of the same tired old Unix way