home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- A brief history of sudo:
-
- Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer
- around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo. It ran on
- a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated version, credited to Phil Betchel,
- Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips, John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to
- the net.sources Usenet newsgroup in December of 1985.
-
- In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version of sudo.
- For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful of folks at
- CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and Trent Hein.
-
- In 1991, Dave Hieb and Jeff Nieusma wrote a new version of sudo with an
- enhanced sudoers format under contract to a consulting firm called "The Root
- Group". This version was later released under the GNU public license.
-
- In 1994, after maintaining sudo informally within CU-Boulder for some time,
- Todd Miller made a public release of "CU sudo" (version 1.3) with bug fixes
- and support for more operating systems. The "CU" was added to differentiate
- it from the "official" version from "The Root Group".
-
- In 1995, a new parser for the sudoers file was contributed by Chris Jepeway.
- The new parser was a proper grammar (unlike the old one) and could work with
- both sudo and visudo (previously they had slightly different parsers).
-
- In 1996, Todd, who had been maintaining sudo for several years in his spare
- time, moved distribution of sudo from a CU-Boulder ftp site to his domain,
- courtesan.com.
-
- In 1999, the "CU" prefix was dropped from the name since there has been no
- formal release of sudo from "The Root Group" since 1991 (the original
- authors now work elsewhere). As of version 1.6, Sudo no longer contains any
- of the original "Root Group" code and is available under an ISC-style
- license.
-
- In 2001, the sudo web site, ftp site and mailing lists were moved from
- courtesan.com to the sudo.ws domain (sudo.org was already taken).
-
- In 2005, Todd rewrote the sudoers parser to better support the features that
- had been added in the past ten years. This new parser removes some
- limitations of the previous one, removes ordering constraints and adds
- support for including multiple sudoers files.
-
- sudo, in its current form, is maintained by:
-
- Todd Miller <Todd.Miller@courtesan.com>
-
- Todd continues to enhance sudo and fix bugs.
-
-