visudo + sudoedit = ♥?

[c4rlo]

I'd like a way to edit my sudoers file (or one of its includes) in a way that combines the best of sudoedit and visudo:

• Runs the editor as myself, like sudoedit
• Ensures I got the syntax right, like visudo

This might be doable today using something like sudo SUDO_EDITOR=my-wrapper visudo, where my-wrapper is a script that copies the given temp file over to a user-writeable one, runs sudoedit on that as SUDO_USER, and copies the modified file back over to original the temp file.

However, I think it would be much nicer if this functionality was available built-in.

In terms of the user interface, I would think it makes most sense to just enhance visudo to detect if it is being run by a user without write access to the given file(s) (i.e. typically a non-root user). If so, rather than invoking the editor directly, it would run sudoedit; perhaps after first checking via sudo -l that the required permissions exist (in order to give a better error message if not).

If this makes sense, I'd be happy to have a go at implementing this.