Bugzilla – Bug 91
wishlist: integrate and extend visudo to handle arbitrary files
Last modified: 2004-01-21 20:00:09 MST
I looked at your web page with similar (competing) utilities and several of them seem to have a feature which I find missing in sudo: the ability to give users permissions to edit root-owned files under relatively strict control. This is the one thing I need to do often as root, and I'd love to be able to have some security added to this scenario. Do you think the visudo component could be brought back into sudo itself, and extended so that you could give users permissions on a per-file basis? Having the option to run a syntax check and/or install script (restart the related daemon, or whatever) would be great, too. It shouldn't even be hard to do, I guess, although the sudoers file format is hard to extend to accommodate this -- but I guess as a matter of fact just for security reasons, you'd like to have a separate file for file permissions in any event. To be perfectly frank, I'd consider moving to one of the other sudo-like solutions if one was available as a Debian package, but it seems that sudo is the one which is actively developed and in relatively common use (on Linux, at least).
The next release of sudo with include the capability to edit files as the invoking user via the new "-e" flag or by running "sudoedit". The changes will show up in the sudo anoncvs tree in a few hours.