[2/3] ntdll: don't treat DOS paths starting with / as Unix paths

[Oleh R. Nykyforchyn]

On Wed, 8 Apr 2009 09:46:26 -0600
Erich Hoover <ehoover at mines.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > ...
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > Luke.
> >
> >
> >
> I personally enjoy the ability to use UNIX paths both in calling
> applications with command-line arguments and in file dialogs (even if it is
> necessary to use the wrong slash in dialogs).  I imagine that there are a
> lot of people that appreciate the ability to use this functionality, since
> you can use the "familiar paths" you do not need to be familiar with the
> windows drive mapping.
> 
> Erich Hoover

I also use wine in somewhat weird way. E.g. I use WinEdt editor under wine to
edit TeX files, and it can launch Linux executables like latex, xdvi, dvips and so on.
WinEdt takes native Unix paths when it opens files and then passes them to Linux
executables. I cannot rely on WinEdt the task to convert Win paths to Unix ones.
Thus, if this feature is dropped, I will not be able to use such mixed Win-Lin
environments. I believe that Wine should preserve it present behaviour as default
and turn on some special treatment of Unix paths (with prefixes etc) on demand,
possibly on per-application basis. 

Oleh Nykyforchyn