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by kelnos 728 days ago
Probably because there's nothing that says only users in wheel (assuming your OS/distro even has that group; some don't) can sudo. You can grant any user with any group membership access to sudo, either full access, or restricted to only certain commands.

If the package was set up to install /usr/bin/sudo so it was only runnable by members of the wheel group, that wouldn't work.

1 comments

It's worth noting that the reason why your OS/distro doesn't have or doesn't respect wheel is largely down to RMS opposing it[0], instead favoring people trading the root password around to unauthorized users.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070603191229/http://www.gnu.or...

It's also worth noting that the Coreutils `su` is no longer in use by anyone, and that the `su` from the shadow-package absolutely checks for wheel. It's even configurable if you haven't enabled PAM by configuring `SU_WHEEL_ONLY` in your login.defs. And with PAM you configure that via PAM.

Hell, not even GNU distros like GNU Guix, Parabola, nor Trisquel follow RMS' opinions on this anymore.

Not all distros use `alias su='sudo -i'`. Ubuntu does. Debian does not. Not sure about others.