Request for patch removal

[L. Rahyen]

On Wednesday January 16 2008 16:01:55 Steve Brown wrote:
> I see in the comments on this bug, that the concern is with multiple
> instances of wineserver running on the machine at one time -- that's not a
> major issue in the use case I envision.  The multiple wineservers would
> not be running at the same time (unless the install is on what Windows
> would call a Terminal Services Server -- a normal multi-user *nix
> machine).

	In practice even if you have multiple wineservers running this isn't too big 
problem (however, it *is* a problem). In fact I have used this for my 
multiuser setup for years and never know about possibility of registry 
curruption. I even thought that there is no problems at all with multiple 
wineservers (in fact *noticeable* registry-related problems are quite rare in 
my case). Now I know that multiple wineservers don't work perfectly together 
and what was the cause of some registry-related problems in my setup. BTW, in 
my setup 3 users share some of WINE prefixes and some Windows programs work 
for all users simultaneously in one WINE prefix.
	Don't think that above means you can forget and ignore that bug! You cannot! 
It needs to be fixed and while it isn't fixed you may (and probably will) face 
with problems like overwriting the registry with older version. For example, 
one user may install program and then correctly shutdown wineserver (for 
example by closing all programs). This will write out registry files to disk. 
Then other user will do that too (without installing anything) and you (or 
user who installed a program) will lose all new registry keys created by the 
installer. Depending on the setup, wineserver can write to the registry and 
possibly overwrite changes made by other users - generally this can happen at 
any time.
	Technically this is very bad, but in practice it is possible to live with it 
if you and your users do not use registry very intensively and do not store 
there very important information. Especially this is true if your users 
rarely run wineservers simultaneously.
	However, if you and your users need 100% reliable setup don't even try! 
There is no locks of any kind so even if you think that your users 
will not run wineservers in WINE prefix at the same time - they still can do 
that, and this can lead to some loses in the registry. Theoretically you can 
create a lock by writing a wrapper script but use of locks is just another 
hack and will not solve the main problem anyway (use of multiple 
wineservers), it needs to be fixed properly.
	You can bypass the check by using symlinks if you *really* 
need this; if you unsure you can just try this and see if it works good enough 
for you and your users (feel free to ask me if you need more instructions or 
help with such setup). And of course don't forget to backup registry before 
trying...
	But remember that this is *strongly discouraged* practice for obvious 
reasons! This is exactly why the patch in question was committed. Therefore 
bypassing the security check is not recommended!
	We really need to fix that bug to allow reliable multiuser setups...