http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10324
--- Comment #5 from L. Rahyen mail@science.su 2007-11-06 14:21:01 --- I don't think that popup is the best option because most users who run as root unintentionally run WINE from console. So I think that warning in the console is enough. If the user run WINE using GUI (for example from Konqueror or Nautilus by clicking on Windows executables) it will most likely run it as simple user. At least this is what we can expect from most distros. However there is some Linux distributions like SLAX (SLAX: Kill Bill edition have WINE installed by default) which run *everything* as root intentionally. We may like or dislike such distributions (personally I dislike them) but WINE should support all real-world environments and shouldn't annoy users too much without cause.
And yes, ability to override this to hide the warning is a good idea. Environment variable is a good option. But having registry key for this purpose is good idea too. Maybe best way will be to support both environment variable and registry key? For example WINE can read dll overrides either from environment (high priority) or the registry (low priority). So it should be easy to make it use both registry key and environment variable to explicitly silence the warning.