dosdevices

[Robert Lunnon]

On Wednesday 19 April 2006 04:26, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Robert Lunnon <bobl at optushome.com.au> writes:
> > All,
> > I am having some considerable problems dealing with a simple issue.
> > In .wine/dosdevices, devices are listed followed by a colon like in dos.
> > This makes perfect sense except that the colon is often used in UNIX to
> > separate elements of a path description and has special meaning tto some
> > programs. Under solaris this causes problems with the runtime loader
> > which can't dlopen a filename containing a colon, and seems to be
> > problematic for stat as well.
> >
> > What is wrong with listing them without the colon so we don't risk these
> > OS incompatibilities or perhaps adapt the code to accept the links with
> > or without an appended colon.
>
> It could be changed, but there are some serious backwards
> compatibility issues. I think wrapping dlopen would be a lot easier,
> especially since we already have a wrapper for it.

This is the approach I took before but for some reason you didn't accept the 
patch in process.c related to starting unix lib type applications. The 
work-around was  to change to the lib directory locate the pwd chdir back, 
then start the lib using the actual path.rather than the link. There may be 
another way to find the target directory of a link more elegantly but I don't 
know it. Anyway, I maintained this delta but it has now expired with the 
changes in process.c and need to be rewritten anyway.

While this course of action (eliminating the colon)  is prone to some 
compatibility issues in the short term I think in the longer term it will 
enhance portability and compatibility and therefore reduce the maintenance 
cost of  "dosdevices" going forward (And perhaps solve a few latent issues 
for non-linux OSen)

Bob