[Beltalowda]

> All I want it to do is: ensure authorization, raise privileges, call exec.

A lot of people do want to do more, especially in some corporate contexts people run very complex sudo setups.

Consider something like Linode; maybe you want some of the more experienced support people to issue some commands on some machines, without having full control. And you've got a gazillion machines so you don't want to setup each one individually (as well as revoke access once they leave). Things can get fairly complex pretty quickly once you move out of simple settings.

For my desktop machine, doas is perfect. For our servers it's fine too because we have just a few people with access. But I'm not everyone of course.

doas was explicitly written to NOT cover all use cases, and that makes it better for the (simpler) use cases it was intended to solve, at the price of not covering other use cases of course.

[hellcow]

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you but doas handles the use-case you describe. I can enforce that some users can issue some commands on a given machine in doas.conf

As someone who manages infra including Linux and OpenBSD and does configure sudo and doas in this way, I’m pretty sure 99% of users would be fine with the simpler tool. Maybe the simpler, safer tool should be the default.

[Beltalowda]

I don't think doas can integrate with PAM, LDAP, and all of that, and the possibilities doas.conf give you are vastly less than what the sudoers file gives you.

> I’m pretty sure 99% of users would be fine with the simpler tool

That probably sound about right, give or take a few %; it probably should be the de-facto default, with sudo being used when doas doesn't suffice. But the question was "why on earth is sudo so complicated?", and the answer to that is "because some people want/need complicated stuff".

[tored]

From a security standpoint point you would want the opposite, the stricter doas on the more exposed servers and and the less strict sudo on the personal desktop.