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

[Austin English]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> wrote:
> James Mckenzie <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> writes:
>
>> It does not hurt anything but Wine's reputation.  I don't know, but
>> the phrase "I would rather be run over rather than run down" does
>> apply here.  In other words, we should be getting positive responses
>> to user experiences, rather than dealing with newbies having to delete
>> their .wine directories because they ran Wine as root without setting
>> to the root environment.
>
> Again, please demonstrate the exact sequence that leads to an actual
> problem, not just vague hearsay of people reporting problems that may or
> may not have anything to do with this.
>
> I'm all for being more friendly to newbies, and that's precisely why I
> want to solve the actual problem (if there is one), not just print a
> warning and then tell them "it's your fault for not heeding the
> warning". We all know that people ignore warnings, so it doesn't add any
> user-friendliness at all, just the opposite.

To list as well, sorry Alexandre:

That wasn't the case I was trying to warn against. I was trying to
warn against running wine as root in general, unless you know the
consequences.

I see people being reminded several times a week of this in the forums
(granted, less since we disabled using sudo).

If we don't mind new users running as root who don't know better, then
we should delete that from the FAQ, and quit recommending against it.
The fact is we don't recommend it, because it has the potential to
cause harm, and the majority of the time, is not needed (especially
for those asking on the forum). However, we DO NOT want users running
as root, as we've made it damn hard to do so, but as the adage goes,
"Fool proof systems do not take into account the ingenuity of fools."
A simple warning, printed in the terminal (at least on the first run
of a prefix), should increase the foolproof-ness of the system (of
course, still not 100%).

-- 
-Austin