loader: more stringent sanity check

Darragh Bailey felix at compsoc.nuigalway.ie
Fri Mar 21 09:37:28 CDT 2008


On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 03:56:08AM -0500, Austin English wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 3:37 AM, Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> wrote:
<snipped>
> >  That's a good point, we could certainly prevent running wineprefixcreate
> >  as root in that case too, that would probably solve most of the
> >  problem. Then people have to explicitly login as root, and in that case
> >  I don't think we want a warning at all.
> 
> Agreed. IMHO, we should not permit running wineprefixcreate with sudo
> (or any other wine commands), but if someone explicitly logs in as
> root, they (hopefully) know what they're doing. Running sudo on a
> current wine directory already issues a warning. While it may be
> paranoia based, I prefer to think of it as a preventative precaution,
> since in due time (if measures aren't taken) someone's bound to take a
> windows virus and screw up  a *nix machine severely. Might as well
> prevent it early (especially well in advance of 1.0.0. It doesn't take
> much effort, and prevents a lot of headache.


I recall seeing an application intended to be run only by normal user
popping up a warning message if started by root. If I recall correctly
it didn't prevent the app from running, but was just a warning against
running the app as root unless you really, really have a good reason to,
with a timer for a couple of seconds to allow the user to abort the
opperation. If the user didn't do anything it would continue on after
timeout.

I think that would help avoid a lot users unnecessarily running wine as
root. It would also get the message out that it's not necessary.

-- 
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."



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