[sudo-users] sudoedit allow people to edit a file at the same time

[Michael]

 Todd,

(i'm on the sudo list)


> The reason this functionality is inside sudo itself, rather than
> in a standalone executable, is twofold.  Firstly, it makes it
> possible to run "sudoedit file" instead of "sudo safe-edit file".

well. Is that really such an issue ?

And sudoedit can just be a wrapper calling safe-edit which in turn does the sudo (if not already called by root).

> It's not impossible to achieve this with a separate binary but there
> would have to be fairly tight coupling between sudo and the safe
> editor.

Or rather, only between the binary or script for 'sudoedit' which is a wrapper calling the separate package safe-edit in the proper way. And safe-edit coders would need to stay in contact to their 'customers' anyway, right ?

> To get the same semantics the sudoers policy would need
> to convert the pseudo-command "sudoedit" into something like
> "safe-edit -u file_user -U real_user -e editor_path files ..."
> and run it as root.

Looks like another idea :) and there probably are more alternatives.

I think it can be done, and no matter what effort it takes, the benefits outweight those: (1) Parallel editing finally works (not), a benefit for users, and (2) clean separation of two different fields of functionality, a benefit for programmers and maintaners.