On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org wrote:
James Mckenzie jjmckenzie51@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%).