Poettering in Mastodon thread:

sudo has serious problems though. It’s a relatively large SUID binary, i.e. privileged code that unprivileged users can invoke from their own context. It has a complicating configuration language, loadable plugins (ldap!), hostname matches and so on and so on.

Okay, fine. So surely he’s going to make a single tool that does one thing in an isolated box that doesn’t pull in any unnecessary functionality.

Poettering a few posts down:

But enough about all that security blabla. The tool is also a lot more fun to use than sudo. For example, by default it will tint your terminal background in a reddish tone while you are operating with elevated privileges.

This is so Poettering. I don’t want a privilege-escalation tool altering the display. Why in God’s name is this not in the shell? What’s going to happen on terminals that can’t handle colors? Are you going to deal with them correctly? Is your “small” tool now going to be handling terminfo?

Every time that guy sees something, he thinks “let’s just rewrite everything from scratch, break the existing tool boundaries, and other people will fix the fallout”.