Sure. I guess it would depend on how complex that is, but surely the sudo command already does validations, so it would just need to have the editor write to a temporary file (which is a copy of the official one) and write once it's validated, right?

It sounds doable in a few months.

[–] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I don't think it's that simple. The challenge is that you need to still behave as if it's invoked as the user so that the editor uses their configurations instead of simply execing it as root.

I could be wrong though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Sudo uses the setuid bit or whatever, so it still has access to the user's environment variables and whatnot. So figuring out which editor to run shouldn't be an issue.

[–] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's not what I mean. Yeah, getting the environment variables are simple enough, but if you simply exec something as the root user, whatever you exec will naturally be looking for configs in /root/.config and not your ~/.config dir, so any configurations to things like your text editor won't be read.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 weeks ago

Ah, makes sense. It's easy enough to duplicate the outer ENV for the sub-process, but I don't know what that means for security and whatnot.