Sudo Development Releases

Current Development Release

The current development release of sudo is 1.9.3rc1.
Binary packages are also available for the development releases.

For full details see the ChangeLog file or view the commit history in mercurial.

If you plan to use a development release of sudo, please subscribe to the sudo-workers mailing list so that you will receive updates on bug fixes and related announcements. You may also be interested in the sudo-commits mailing list which receives a message for each commit to the sudo source tree.

Major changes between version 1.9.3rc1 and 1.9.3b2:

  • Compilation fixes when compiling for Android using the bionic C library.

Major changes between version 1.9.3b2 and 1.9.3b1:

Major changes between version 1.9.3b1 and 1.9.2:

  • sudoedit will now prompt the user before overwriting an existing file with one that is zero-length after editing. Bug #922.

  • Fixed building the Python plugin on systems with a compiler that doesn't support symbol hiding.

  • Sudo now uses a linker script to hide symbols even when the compiler has native symbol hiding support. This should make is easier to detect omissions in the symbol exports file, regardless of the platform.

  • Fixed the libssl dependency in Debian packages for older releases that use libssl1.0.0.

  • sudo and visudo now provide more detailed messages when a syntax error is detected in sudoers. The offending line and token are now displayed. If the parser was generated by GNU bison, additional information about what token was expected is also displayed. Bug #841.

  • Sudoers rules must now end in either a newline or the end-of-file. Previously, it was possible to have multiple rules on a single line, separated by white space. The use of an end-of-line terminator makes it possible to display accurate error messages.

  • Sudo no longer refuses to run if a syntax error in the sudoers file is encountered. The entry with the syntax error will be discarded and sudo will continue to parse the file. This makes recovery from a syntax error less painful on systems where sudo is the primary method of superuser access. The historic behavior can be restored by add error_recovery=false to the sudoers plugin's optional arguments in sudo.conf. Bug #618.

  • Fixed the sample_approval plugin's symbol exports file for systems where the compiler doesn't support symbol hiding.

  • Fixed a regression introduced in sudo 1.9.1 where arguments to the sudoers_policy plugin in sudo.conf were not being applied. The sudoers file is now parsed by the sudoers_audit plugin, which is loaded implicitly when sudoers_policy is listed in sudo.conf. Starting with sudo 1.9.3, if there are plugin arguments for sudoers_policy but sudoers_audit is not listed, those arguments will be applied to sudoers_audit instead.

  • The user's resource limits are now passed to sudo plugins in the user_info[] list. A plugin cannot determine the limits itself because sudo changes the limits while it runs to prevent resource starvation.

  • It is now possible to set the working directory or change the root directory on a per-command basis using the CWD and CHROOT options. There are also new Defaults settings, runchroot and runcwd, that can be used to set the working directory or root directory on a more global basis.

  • New -D (--chdir) and -R (--chroot) command line options can be used to set the working directory or root directory if the sudoers file allows it. This functionality is not enabled by default and must be explicitly enabled in the sudoers file.