"Dan Kegel" dank@kegel.com wrote:
What's so special about Wine that doesn't apply to say VMWare, Parallels, Win4Lin, DOSBox, and others?
With vmware, parallels, and win4lin, you can actually run commercial virus scanners inside those environments,
Is it really necessary to require running a virus scanner from inside of Wine?
and everybody knows that one should do that if one cares about viruses.
Same sentence applies to Wine I'd assume.
With DOSBox, well, the target market for that tool is so small compared to Wine it doesn't matter, they're mostly technical users, and there isn't much ms-dos malware being written these days.
There are thousands of existing DOS viruses, it doesn't matter that nobody writes new ones anymore, there are plenty of them already.
So Wine really is different; you can't run commercial virus scanners in it,
It's still possible to run a native virus scanner outside of Wine. Wine is just a part of underlying system, not a separate environment.
it's for users who aren't technical enough to be able to find an antivirus solution on their own,
That's not different from other environments providing DOS/Windows compatibility.
and (worst of all) everybody assumes Linux is impervious to viruses.
I already answered to this one.
Probably yes, we could extend the FAQ section about security, but that's almost everything we can do.
I pointed out several other things we could do. Another one is we could make the wine package list clamav as a dependency.
Denying there's a problem, or that we can do anything about it, might lead to a large number of unhappy users.
Nobody denies that there is a problem, the thing is that personally I don't see why that problem is Wine specific.