On Friday 29 June 2001 04:25 pm, you methodically organized electrons to
state:
> The reason is that for sane operation Win4Lin relies on some read-only
> shared files really being read-only and thus staying uncorrupted.
> In the early days when we were just getting Windows support implemented,
> if we ran Windows as root, it would occasionally write to one of these
> files it was not supposed to be writing to and thus causing odd and
> hard-to-diagnose problems. So it is very important to enforce the
> UNIX/Linux file permissions when Windows has access to your filesystem.
>
> Win4Lin acts the same was as Merge has, and has from the very first version
> that supported Windows. Basically Windows cannot be trusted to not hose
> your system. You as superuser can be trusted to use the system wisely
> when you are in that mode, but unfortunatly Windows is not to be trusted
> to not do something outside of your notice and screw things up.
>
> -David
I didn't mean for my rant to malign Win4Lin specifically -- it's a great
product. It was general complaint about a trend becoming all to common. For
example, the HTML editor bluefish won't run as root because the author
doesn't believe any application programs should be run that way. In Mandrake
7.1, the root user could not create desktop application icons for the same
irrational reason.
I recall reading before the reason Win4Lin does not run as root and it's as
valid as they come. It's excuting code that will misbehave if offered the
opportunity, although making the affected files immutable might solve _that_
problem, I'm certain it would create others. Perhaps a knowelgeable superuser
_should_ be able to run Win4Lin as root and take his chances, but that would
create a support nightmare. Oh, well.
There are always so many tradeoffs in design.
Hoyt
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