wine virus story

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Edward Savage" <epssyis at gmail.com> wrote:

> The assumption is that since win32 virus are so windows specific and
> require so many small windows bugs and tweaks to run that they are a
> good test bed to see how good windows compatibility really is.  In
> general they are also rather badly written so finding linux-wine
> compatibility issues should also be possible as well, we know they run
> under windows so if they don't under wine then that is an issue that
> should be looked at that could also fix other legit applications.

If you have plenty of free time in your hands it would be much better
spent with testing real applications, or rather triaging bugs in Wine
bugzilla.

> Besides I hardly think that is part of an image that doesn't already
> exist or is even bad for the project.  When I've seen wine in the
> media (a good number of times now) the comment has been, paraphrased,
> 'so good that it can even run some windows virus'.
> 
> I would suggest that the real media damage would come from any virus
> running that we don't know about and then root kits or wipes some poor
> newbies system.  I can see the slashdot headline now, "Users under
> threat from unknown virus risks when using Wine".
> 
> I'm happy to just do this as a pet project and maybe report findings
> for wwn or similar but in general I think it'd be some thing worth at
> least keeping track of officially.

That's exactly what hurts Wine: a misguided report of a clueless user,
and WWN is not the place for it neither.

-- 
Dmitry.