ntdll: add a warning about running wine as root (resend)

[James Mckenzie]

Chris Howe <mrmessiah at gmail.com> wrote:
>Sent: Feb 9, 2009 8:06 AM
>To: wine-devel at winehq.org
>Subject: Re: ntdll: add a warning about running wine as root (resend)
>
>It would seem to me that the right place for this to go would be
>not in Wine itself but in the likes of Crossover and Cedega - the
>"distributions" and value added apps built around Wine.
>
>I can't reconcile in my head the case where you have a newbie
>running the latest GIT of Wine needing this kind of thing at all.
>
Newbies don't run GITs, they download a prebuild version of Wine from a repository.  Thus, this 'fix' would not appear to them until the release of 1.1.15 at the earliest.

>Either they want the power and compatibility of the latest GIT
>version, and all that that entails, including the potential for doing
>things they didn't intend if they run it as root, or they want some
>newbie friendly environment that seizes back the reins a little
>and stops them doing that.
>
All versions of Wine that I've run into have the ability to run as root.  This is inherent as a part of any UNIX program.  What we are discussing is that running as root may make your system vulnerable and may cause problems later when Wine is run in user space.  My example is that a user logs in and installs a program as root because they were told that it 'runs better' as root.  When it is discovered to not be true, the user then attempts to run in user space only to be advised they have no access to the program.  The solution given is to remove the user space Wine directories and to start over.  The user gets upset, sometimes with implied violence, and then abandons Wine.  What happens is that this user gets on other areas and talks bad about Wine.  Thus, Wine gets another black eye to overcome.  The idea is to warn users that problems may be encountered if they run Wine as root.  If they continue on, it is on them.  A message box or warning on the screen, shown one time, is all most newbies need to come back to the forum and ask how to do something.  Experts will charge on and if they mess up their system, they know how to fix it.

James McKenzie