On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:17 AM, James Mckenzie <[email protected]> wrote: > Alexandre Julliard <[email protected]> >>Sent: Feb 9, 2009 5:56 AM >>To: Austin English <[email protected]> >>Cc: [email protected] >>Subject: Re: ntdll: add a warning about running wine as root (resend) >> >>Austin English <[email protected]> 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
