Comment 5 for bug 183922

On Jan 18, 2008 10:34 AM, dankegel <email address hidden> wrote:
> Anything that crashes Xorg is an Xorg (or driver)
> bug. It cannot be a wine bug. Please reassign.

@Dankegel
You contribute much to our community, and I for one appreciate your
participation, but I have to disagree with you on this one.

While I do not know the particulars of this bug, I know that the
categorical statement above is not true. Whether it's a bug in Wine or
Xorg depends on the facts. Killing the session may be the right thing
for Xorg to do if another program misbehaves badly enough.

Documents created from Microsoft Office components in particular are
susceptible to extremely bad code execution. The biggest reason is
that the VBasic scripting language that is embedded in Office macros
makes it possible to embed dangerous code in a document, sometimes
without realizing it. This turns out to be a prime suspect in such
cases because macro execution is the only technical reason to run
MSOffice on a Linux box in the first place. OpenOffice can read and
write the MS formats as well or better than MSOffice itself. However,
many companies have developed documents with complex and sometimes
sophisticated macros and scripts, which OpenOffice cannot yet run with
any safety. Consequently, such companies are often compelled to use
MSOffice, even when they have otherwise converted to open source.

Again, I don't know the specifics of this case, but we can't just
dismiss the possibility that the issue should be fixed in Wine. A
program such as Wine that undertakes to run code written for another
operating system should generally be responsible for containing any
malfeasance that the code causes.

Happy Trails

--
Loye Young
Isaac & Young Computer Company
Laredo, Texas
http://www.iycc.biz