Comment by novafunc
21 hours ago
It’s not a knockoff. They have a friendly relationship with the original creator of sudo. And their work helps uncover bugs of the original sudo so they send fixes upstream.
21 hours ago
It’s not a knockoff. They have a friendly relationship with the original creator of sudo. And their work helps uncover bugs of the original sudo so they send fixes upstream.
Friendly relationship or not, the end user experience is that something that was working, no longer is, because it's not feature compatible. This is despite it being used to replace it under the same name. If it had been `runas` or anything else it'd be fine.
There's a strong principle in upstream Linux kernel about "You don't break userspace"[1], that I really wish more folks would get into their heads, but most especially a variant "You don't subtly break userspace".
If you're going to replace an existing binary, under the same name, you need to be like-for-like in commands, even if your guts are completely different. Very few people give a damn about how it's actually implemented, just does it do what they need it to do.
If you want to do things differently, do it under a different name and have it be an explicit break for an end user by not shipping with the original and let people choose to install it if they really don't want the new thing. Breaking things subtly is completely unacceptable.
[1] espoused really clearly, as part of an infamous rant https://lore.kernel.org/all/CA+55aFy98A+LJK4+GWMcbzaa1zsPBRo...
Yeah "You don't break userspace" refers to the kernel <-> userspace interface (libc) because that's the smallest common denominator and the reason why stuff like snap works.
Besides that userspace has been incompatible between distros for at least 30 years because everyone has that one special patch the library needs on their distro that isn't accepted upstream and breaks things beyond repair.
This was already the case in the 1990s when Applixware shipped 30 different versions of their software on one CD-Rom because it should run on different distros and their versions.
And back then there weren't that many, mostly Red Hat, SuSE and Debian.
All the time wasted on navel-gazing could have been spent auditing and fixing the original projects' code.
Starting anew WILL introduce new bugs. This is a statistical certainty.
Most Rust rewrites are justified upon imaginary boogeymen. The complex security nightmares of 'cp' 'ls' and 'rm' were begging for a new design.
One would never return “*” to signal an error in rust code (or any language with an option type).
Nothing precludes error handling in C. It's on the programmers to actually do it.
1 reply →
[flagged]
If your goal is to convince people that you're right, describing things as "time wasted on navel-gazing" is not the type of thing that will win people over. It comes across as arrogant and entitled, as if the world would be better if everyone would just recognize you're smarter and therefore should do whatever you want.
If you're just pissed and trying to blow off steam, maybe this choice of words will help a bit, but because of the issues described above, it also might just cause a bunch of people to react negatively towards you and therefore make your mood worse.
If you're just commenting here as something to reference in the future for when you expect to say "I told you so!" to everyone, I guess this is a reasonable way of doing it. It still doesn't really seem like there's much need for phrasing it like that though; people still might look back and think that you're right but still sound arrogant and entitled.
[flagged]
3 replies →
I can’t stress this enough: there are—rightfully—a whole bunch of people that simply do not want to work on C codebases, because in the typical case, working wIth C sucks. Your outbursts are never going to change this, no matter how petulant or vitriolic. Amazing how a group of people has made “[aversion to{ languages with far fewer footguns” into some sort of culture war issue. Sorry that the industry is forcing you to read a book or whatever.