wine/programs/wcmd wcmdmain.c

[Geoff Thorpe]

On Thursday 10 Oct 2002 4:43 pm, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 10:30:40AM -0700, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> > There is no way to prevent a Windows application running under Wine
> > from doing everything a Unix application could do. Even if you
> > don't let CreateProcess launch Unix programs the Windows app can
> > always do a straight system call
>
> This leaves just two options for the paranoid: Don't run untrusted
> applications - yeah I know that comes as a surprise :-) or run Wine
> inside UserModeLinux.

Or run it as a different user? Wine doesn't run a virtual machine, so 
you can't prevent running code (ie. whether it was loaded by wine or 
not) from doing anything that the user it's running as could do. 
Therefore, logically, the only rules that wine-loaded win32 code can't 
break are the same rules that no other program running as the same user 
can't break. So the way I see it there's no logical argument for 
putting restrictive rules into WINE that only make something 
*potentially* useful more difficult (and a lot less elegant) to do. In 
fact it could be very useful, especially for people wanting to mix 
"shell"-like tools which are in some cases native to win32 (eg. 
"cl.exe" or "somewebserver.exe") or native to unix (eg. "gmake" and 
"/etc/init.d/w32server", respectively).

Curiously, I see an analogy with comparing the quality of two kind of 
systems I've used before. System type A can only run binary/linked 
executables. System type B can run binary/linked executables *and* can 
also "run" text scripts by transparently invoking interpreter 
executables to interpret/compile/run the script contents - moreover, 
these linked executables and the scripts *can call each other*. [:-) 
I've used both type of systems often and I know that I prefer type B. 
In fact there's this cool app called WINE that works with systems of 
type B that allows you to run a *third* category of programs; those 
executables that were linked to run solely in system type A! Maybe I 
could turn my argument/opinion into a recursive tautology ...?
   "WINE make sense" iff "win32 and native binaries can interact"
   QED

:-)

Cheers,
Geoff