Re: On the issue of MIME handlers that execute arbitrary code (e.g. Wine)

[Aaron Rainbolt <arraybolt3 () riseup net>]

On Tue, 19 May 2026 19:30:42 -0400
Aaron Rainbolt <arraybolt3 () gmail com> wrote:

> > > If all applications followed the xdg-mime manpage's advice to never
> > > execute code when opening a file, this wouldn't be that big of a
> > > problem. This is where Wine comes in; it ships a desktop file that
> > > registers Wine as a MIME handler for
> > > 'application/x-ms-dos-executable', 'application/x-msi', and
> > > 'application/x-bat'.    
> >
> > Note that not all packaged versions of Wine do this: for example in 
> > Debian, this MIME handler was disabled in 2013 in response to 
> > <https://bugs.debian.org/327262>.  
>
> Good. Unfortunately, convincing upstream to follow suit is proving to
> be a challenge...

Someone in the Wine bug report mentioned portability as a concern with
getting Wine to handle EXE files transparently. binfmt-misc can be used
on Linux, but not on the BSDs, which Wine also supports. I'm not sure
there is any good mechanism on BSD to mark a file type as executable,
which is ultimately what Wine is trying to do. MIME handlers are a
(bad, but possibly the only portable) way to work around that
limitation.

--
Aaron

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