It doesn’t sit quite right with me to use the name of an existing project like this. It’s not a port, or a fork, and doesn’t aim for any sort of compatibility. It would be pretty annoying if unix sudo started getting bug reports from this.
No it doesn’t. It’s just a script with the same name with only vaguely similar functionality. They’ve done it before, with curl and wget, which in powershell are pre-defined to be things that don’t at all work like how wget or curl actually work.
I wouldn’t have much issue if Microsoft put (the moral equivalent of) a symlink at /usr/bin/sudo to a program that wasn’t quite sudo-shaped - “sudo” is the established syntax for “run this command as administrator” at this point, and there’s an argument that having the same syntax in 99% of cases matters more than a few slight differences for unusual invocations and implementation details.
But actually calling the project - i.e. the GitHub repo, the title of the blog post, etc, etc - “sudo” really rubs me the wrong way. That’s someone else’s name, you don’t get to just take it, especially when they’re an open-source project and you’re a multibillion dollar company. Even something like “winsudo” would’ve been fine, but “Sudo for Windows” in particular conveys something very particular that just isn’t true here.
It’s also such a break with their regular naming scheme. As an alias I’d understand, but I’d expect the actual command to look like Run-Elevated or smth.
Wow, the comparison to runas (which has been part of NT for a long time. I used it on NT4 and I think it’s older) is weird. It seems runas already does almost everything MS sudo does and a bunch of things it doesn’t. Why not just add the handful of missing features to the existing tool, rather than shipping a new tool with a confusing name?
It seems like just a wrapper script over a sudo.exe binary which I assume is proprietary. Not that I care about Microsoft open sourcing its components. Just a bit confused.
I think this code is probably still in early stages so I wouldn’t want it to be treated too harshly. (…)
The worst case scenario is if an admin uses this command on a shared server, such as a terminal server then any other user on the system could get their administrator access. Oh well, such is life…
I will give Microsoft props though for writing the code in Rust, at least most of it. Of course it turns out that the likelihood that it would have had any useful memory corruption flaws to be low even if they’d written it in ANSI C. This is a good lesson on why just writing in Rust isn’t going to save you if you end up just introducing logical bugs instead.
Introducing Word for OpenBSD
It doesn’t sit quite right with me to use the name of an existing project like this. It’s not a port, or a fork, and doesn’t aim for any sort of compatibility. It would be pretty annoying if unix sudo started getting bug reports from this.
What, you have a problem with Micro$oft embracing Unix tooling and program names? It just extends sudo to run on Windows, what’s the harm?
No it doesn’t. It’s just a script with the same name with only vaguely similar functionality. They’ve done it before, with curl and wget, which in powershell are pre-defined to be things that don’t at all work like how wget or curl actually work.
I think the person you’re replying to is making an “embrace, extend, extinguish” joke about Microsoft’s past behaviour.
Just to be pedantic,
curllinks toC:\WINDOWS\system32\curl.exe, which is built from the same source code.This may have changed, but for a long time there was an alias in Powershell linking curl to Invoke-WebRequest. Even after they added curl.exe to windows, the alias remained. You can read about it here: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershell-curl-alias/
as the page you linked to says, by default if you run
curlin PowerShell, what you get is not actually curl.exeand that is why I install it from
chocolateyto have the expected behaviorAgreed.
I wouldn’t have much issue if Microsoft put (the moral equivalent of) a symlink at /usr/bin/sudo to a program that wasn’t quite sudo-shaped - “sudo” is the established syntax for “run this command as administrator” at this point, and there’s an argument that having the same syntax in 99% of cases matters more than a few slight differences for unusual invocations and implementation details.
But actually calling the project - i.e. the GitHub repo, the title of the blog post, etc, etc - “sudo” really rubs me the wrong way. That’s someone else’s name, you don’t get to just take it, especially when they’re an open-source project and you’re a multibillion dollar company. Even something like “winsudo” would’ve been fine, but “Sudo for Windows” in particular conveys something very particular that just isn’t true here.
If the roles were reversed, MS would call it a “trademark violation” and be sending in the lawyers. Remember Lindows?
It’s also such a break with their regular naming scheme. As an alias I’d understand, but I’d expect the actual command to look like Run-Elevated or smth.
Wow, the comparison to runas (which has been part of NT for a long time. I used it on NT4 and I think it’s older) is weird. It seems runas already does almost everything MS sudo does and a bunch of things it doesn’t. Why not just add the handful of missing features to the existing tool, rather than shipping a new tool with a confusing name?
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
What is the point of this repository? https://github.com/microsoft/sudo
It seems like just a wrapper script over a sudo.exe binary which I assume is proprietary. Not that I care about Microsoft open sourcing its components. Just a bit confused.
The README mentions that the process of open sourcing the code isn’t done yet and they do intend to also publish the actual sudo binary’s code.
James Forshaw took a quick look, summarizing it as
Such innovation at Microsoft.
I guess that’s better than administratordo
If “sudo” once stood for “super user do”, “administrator do” logically would be “ado”, which seems not bad. :-)
Yeah, but that would me much ado about nothing XD
Coincidentally, earlier this week I found gsudo for Windows.