4 ms·

They've done it with curl: they made an alias to their own program not supporting the same feature set and it inevitably backfired [1]. sudo is a complex progra

by jraph 3y ago

They've done it with curl: they made an alias to their own program not supporting the same feature set and it inevitably backfired [1]. sudo is a complex program with a lot of different options [2] and as people from MS said here, it's never going to be compatible because of how Windows works differently. While I understand picking a familiar name, sudo is certainly not the only player, there's also doas. This shows people can adapt to another name and another name would have seemed more appropriate. edit: whoops, it was already mentioned in this thread [3] [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershell-curl-alias/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershe... [2] https://linux.die.net/man/8/sudo https://linux.die.net/man/8/sudo [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39305452#39309126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39305452#39309126

JoshTriplett 3y ago
> sudo is certainly not the only player, there's also doas. This shows people can adapt to another name The fact that doas has far fewer users, and examples everywhere show `sudo xyz` as the way to run xyz as root, shows that people do not adapt to a different name. Microsoft has been trying, for years, to get developers to use Windows systems. This is another good step towards doing so. The answer isn't to use a different name; the answer is to actually support most of the sudo interface. But that said, there's a subset of the sudo interface that would cover the majority of what most people need on a regular basis: -H (change home directory) -i (act like a login shell, which may not be meaningful on Windows but could at least be ignored for compatibility) -E (preserve the environment) -u (set the user to something other than root) -g (set the group) -s (just run a shell)
- snvzz 3y ago
  >The answer isn't to use a different name; the answer is to actually support most of the sudo interface. The answer is to do either. i.e. the complaint about using the name while offering a different, incompatible interface is valid.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    Yes, I agree. I do think it was correct to use the name, though, which means they should be more compatible.
divbzero 3y ago
Using sudo for a Windows program doesn’t seem as bad as using curl as an alias for Invoke-WebRequest. While the real curl can be installed and fully functional on Windows, sudo is intuitively an OS-level program that deals with OS-level access control.

by jraph 3y ago

JoshTriplett 3y ago

> sudo is certainly not the only player, there's also doas. This shows people can adapt to another name The fact that doas has far fewer users, and examples everywhere show `sudo xyz` as the way to run xyz as root, shows that people do not adapt to a different name. Microsoft has been trying, for years, to get developers to use Windows systems. This is another good step towards doing so. The answer isn't to use a different name; the answer is to actually support most of the sudo interface. But that said, there's a subset of the sudo interface that would cover the majority of what most people need on a regular basis: -H (change home directory) -i (act like a login shell, which may not be meaningful on Windows but could at least be ignored for compatibility) -E (preserve the environment) -u (set the user to something other than root) -g (set the group) -s (just run a shell)

snvzz 3y ago
>The answer isn't to use a different name; the answer is to actually support most of the sudo interface. The answer is to do either. i.e. the complaint about using the name while offering a different, incompatible interface is valid.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. I do think it was correct to use the name, though, which means they should be more compatible.

divbzero 3y ago

Using sudo for a Windows program doesn’t seem as bad as using curl as an alias for Invoke-WebRequest. While the real curl can be installed and fully functional on Windows, sudo is intuitively an OS-level program that deals with OS-level access control.