2009/4/8 Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org:
Luke Benstead kazade@gmail.com writes:
This is probably a really dumb question... but why does wine support UNIX paths? What is the circumstance where a Windows application will be trying to access a native file or directory? The only example I can think of is that an app has specifically been written to be used in Wine, in which case, shouldn't native UNIX paths be disabled by default, and perhaps turned on with an environment variable?
It can be used anywhere an app uses a user-specified path without mangling it too much; admittedly that doesn't happen very often, apps like to mangle paths. There are also places where Wine itself depends on it, to support things like "wine ~/foo.exe" or to allow Unix paths in some registry entries.
These are all things that could probably be reimplemented in a more reliable fashion, for instance by using \?\unix instead of relying on the path detection heuristic. Once this is done properly everywhere, then maybe the hackish way could be removed.
-- Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org
That sounds like a far better way of doing it. Perhaps though, if that method was implemented, passing a program path directly into wine (wine ~/foo.exe) would be a special case (without a \?\ prefix). From a users point of view that's what I'd expect, as you haven't yet started the application (and entered windows land :) ).
Luke.