On 2/12/07, richardvoigt@gmail.com richardvoigt@gmail.com wrote:
You advocated that wine aim for working exactly like Windows, no less and no more, rather than deviating in user-configurable ways to enhance the user's control over his own system.
Right. That's the purpose of Wine. You'd know that if you were a developer on this project.
Maybe while we're at it, wine should have the bug which allows certain software to prevent screen grabs.
I don't know of any apps that depend on this behavior, so that's not likely to happen.
No, I think defeating DRM to enable fair use is perfectly reasonable, and there are some bugs which should be fixed. Should wine try to patch remote exploits at the exact same rate as windowsupdate.com?
Since we have completely different code bases, I don't see how we can fix their code in our tree.
That would be also be required for true bug-for-bug compatibility. After all, someone properly authorized might be using that backdoor to reboot their webfarm remotely -- not!
There are things that are wrong in a theoretical sense (i.e. the Pentium floating-point bug), or misclassification of Unicode characters, which some programs might reasonably depend on. And then there are things that are wrong from a practical engineering perspective, like software taking away the user's choice to not run it, which the mere fact that a program depends on it makes it malware.
Are you a software engineer? From a practical engineering perspective, adding this option adds unnecessary complication to the code base and increases the chances for bugs. This is exactly what UAC does, and no competent engineer thinks UAC is a good thing, or that it adds any amount of security. This "malware" that you're so afraid of can just write over that registry entry.
Asking if you want to run every file set for startup in wineboot every single time is crippling behavior, not to mention annoying. UAC anyone? If you're so worried about this "malware", create a reduced privileges account just for Wine.
That's the point of a "remember my choice" or "Yes/No/Always/Never" option on the prompt which appears when the winecfg option is ask...
If this entry defaults to "Always" or "Never", then the users won't even know that the option exists, and that's one more piece of information that we'll have to broadcast and answer questions about.
Reduced privileges do little or nothing to prevent network abuse (open spam relay and the like).
If you're running executables that are going to add themselves to AutoStart, the fact that they might run again is the least of your concerns.