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

[Austin English]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:17 AM, James Mckenzie
<jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>

As James has pointed out, something should be done about all the users
running as root on the forums/Bugzilla that don't need to be. Perhaps
adding a registry key to disable the warning? Or only once per
WINEPREFIX?

It's only output in the terminal, not as a messagebox and is not very
obtrusive...one could make the same argument about the Gecko/Mozilla
warning that is shown with each new WINEPREFIX. Mousepad (default XFCE
text editor) does something similar, a small red bar at the top of
each document when ran as root/sudo. I've seen a few other programs
doing similar things (not sure of others off hand.

While I understand that there's (sometimes) a legitimate need for it,
we've made similar accommodations in the past, e.g., disabling moving
the c drive in winecfg to prevent hosing windows partitions, but
allowing those who can do so manually in terminal to do so. This is
similar, but even LESS obtrusive. It's only a bit of text to say,
"Hey, probably a bad idea, you might hose your system by giving
windows programs full access...you've been warned."

-- 
-Austin