On Wed, 21 Sep 2011, Ken Thomases wrote: [...]
That sounds like Mac OS X's application firewall which is Apple's primary firewall instead of a more traditional packet filtering firewall. The application firewall is based around which local applications and services are trusted to accept in-bound connections
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You can disable the application firewall in System Preferences
Security > Firewall.
Yes that's the one that brings up this dialog. For instance if I run ws2_32:sock with the firewall enabled I get asked whether I want to allow 'wineserver' (!) to accept incoming network connections. Interestingly if I don't answer and look into the firewall configuration after ws2_32_test.exe is done, I see that wineserver did got added with 'Block incomming connections'. So in the next run I am not asked that question again but then the connections are presumably really blocked.
A related question is whether it is actually known to have an impact on the test results or not. Again, looking at the ws_32:sock results I saw no difference, even over multiple runs. Looking at the full results of a pair of runs on winetest.org the only difference I saw is an unrelated failure in d3d9:device.
http://test.winehq.org/data/b6153354dd28c57fb1f92f85df1f1ba751794fc1/index_M...
Is what's saving us that the firewall always allows connections originating from the local IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.42 to 192.168.0.42)?
Windows XP / Vista / 7 pop up similar dialogs and I don't know if they cause trouble either. I suspect not and this may be the reason why too.
Anyway, the application firewall is based on code-signing. The user's permission to allow a program to accept incoming connections is tied to the program's signature.
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Since regularly testing Wine entails constantly rebuilding it, the signature never survives for long and the system asks for permission with every new build.
Exactly. So should the application firewall be causing trouble, the only solution would be to disable it :-( I guess there's no way to automatically authorize / sign the application?