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

[James Mckenzie]

Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org>
>Sent: Feb 9, 2009 5:56 AM
>To: Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>
>Cc: wine-devel at winehq.org
>Subject: Re: ntdll: add a warning about running wine as root (resend)
>
>Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Didn't receive any feedback on this one last time. Been seeing this a
>> bit recently in the forums, so adding a warning. No actual
>> functionality lost.
>
>We've been through this before. There are legitimate reasons for running
>as root, and we don't want to have any sort of warning or message box
>getting in the way.
>
First, I respect the fact that AJ does not "want a box getting in the way". but I feel that clicking through a box as an experienced user is nothing but an additional mouse click.

Second, the problem is that newbies, figuring that their favorite program will not run as an ordinary user, gets a wiff that root has more privileges, will attempt run as root totally hosing their Wine directory.  This then starts the 'you should not run Wine as root' mantra on Wine-Users.  This then causes the newbie to question why did I go to Linux/Wine when I had a perfectly running Windows system?  

Third, I agree that we need a warning for running as root, selectable to be disabled for those of us who are knowledgible enough to know what to do if we hose up our user space Wine directory.  This satisfies the 'don't do this unless you are really sure what you are doing' cases and leaves the experts to do what we need to do.

Austin, can you send me, via private mail, a .plan to implement this functionality for testing.

AJ, unless you want to scare off newbies, we need this functionality.  I understand that we don't want to upset the apple cart with experts, but the newbies running root is getting very old.  We need the newbies to try things, but running as root has been tested throughly and we all know that this busts Wine.  Newbies don't need to be exposed to this.

James McKenzie