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Cake day: June 15th, 2025

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  • Well that’s a very valid argument. If cost and impact of an error is very high and a rewrite mitigates that, sure, why not rewrite it. But in this comment thread I had to offer this argument myself, I haven’t really seen it properly communicated.
    It’s always — memory safety this, error handling that… These are good reasons to pick a language for a new project, but, god damn, it’s a stupid reason for a stable program rewrite (let’s say the program is mostly in maintenance mode: no major new features are planned; correct me if that’s not the case for sudo).


  • Went through the releases quickly and it does look like maintenance work is being done more than anything.

    Last minor version update was in 2020 which is not that recent (although quite recent). All other releases since have mostly fixes. I’ve seen only a couple of things that were not Fixed something in the notes.

    Maybe our definitions of active development are different, but to me this does look like maintenance.



  • Mr. Satan@lemmy.ziptolinuxmemes@lemmy.world🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀
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    5 days ago

    Ok, valid, is sudo (in this case) actively developed? Hom much maintenance does it require?

    All these analogies amount to what exactly? New == better?

    I get the enthusiasm for new shiny thing, especially when the new tool is better. But why do we need something like sudo rewriten? How does it make lives easier?

    There’s a saying: if it ain’t broke… I’m trying to figure how and why it’s broken and all I see just a selling pitch for the language.


  • Well that’s the thing that I don’t see communicated. Is it actively developed? Bug fixes doesn’t count, it’s maintenance not active development. If I’m just doing maintenance then there must be a lot of issues to warrant a rewrite, especially in a different language.

    Form what I keep seeing it looks like a rewrite for the sake of rewriting, which is at best misguided reasoning.

    I can see an argument that the cost of failure is very high with something like sudo, but I don’t see it vocalized anywhere.


  • Can anyone explain why do we need this rewrite? What I’m hearing is just that the language is memory safe and, honestly, it sounds like a weak argument. Unless the program is actively evolving or requires regular updates and it can be seen that a rewrite could genuinely improve things…

    All I’ve seen in these media posts were just vague “what if” arguments. If that’s it, a rewrite seems pretty dumb.