Optionally map the unix filesystem instead of drive letters into the shell namespace

Michael Jung mjung at iss.tu-darmstadt.de
Fri May 27 04:20:19 CDT 2005


Hi Michael, 

On Friday 27 May 2005 03:03, Michael Lin wrote:
> Just a few things with this approach.
> As I mentioned before .. with a global flag in the registry.
> User can't run a winelib application with unix path and a Windows
> application on Wine with dos path at the same time.

Please consider the configure based global flag only an option. That's 
actually what I said several times. It could be a per application option as 
well. And there is no problem in activating it via a wine-specific API, which 
would override the config on a per process basis. 

> Ok ... I know your approach is base everything on dos path and the
> global flag is simply a display mode.
> But what about the parsing of the file name editbox in the file dialog?
> The user is browsing unix file system, but does the user enter unix or
> dos path?
> I believe I can modify your solution to accept unix file path, but it
> have to accept dos path as well.

Modifying shfldr_unixfs to parse unix path in addition to dos paths is 
trivial: Just remove the (pUnixFolder->m_dwPathMode == PATHMODE_UNIX) test
in line 339. The real problem is the test for invalid chars in the filedialog, 
which '/' is one of. The solution is obvious: If wine is configured to 
display unix paths, then accept '/' as a valid char in paths in comdlg32. You 
will have to do this for your solution as well, don't you?

> Then there is also the issue of having to have the unix root mapped to a
> dos drive.

That's true. 

Actually, we are tackling two slightly different problems here: I would like 
to have existend applications, for which I don't have the source, to display 
unix paths instead of dos paths in their file dialogs. So I want MS Office to 
display unix paths in it's file dialogs. IMHO there is not way to achieve 
this without the requirement to map one of the dos drives to '/'. At least 
not if the user should be able to access every file on his filesystem.

This solution can also be applied to winelib applications. If you want to use 
the native posix file functions (which, frankly, I don't see a reason to do, 
because the user doesn't care how filenames look in the core dump, but only 
how they look on the screen) then just map the paths coming out of the file 
dialog to unix with the wine_nt_to_unix_path function.

I do understand that there are some shortcomings of this approach for winelib 
applications, which can not possibly be addressed this way. But it seems 
equaly obvious to me that your approach can never achieve the goal I laid out 
above (To make native apps display the unix paths in file dialogs).

So perhaps there might be demand for both solutions. Or perhaps I'm totaly off 
the point and the only person on the planet who likes to see unix paths in 
his native windows applications on wine. Which would mean your solution might 
be the only one people are interested in. 

What I meant to say is, please fell free to implement your solution the way 
you like it and let the wine community decide on it. But please don't modify 
shfldr_unixfs in a way that breaks my solution (Conceptually, that is. Bugs, 
of course, are unavoidable.)

> Troy, Alexandre and I have been discussing other possible solutions to
> this problem offline.

I don't want to offend, but I think this just isn't fair. I have contributed a 
lot of my free time working on this stuff, and I think I would have deserved 
to be informed on discussions and decisions in this matter. Above that, this 
kind of discussion should take place on wine-devel, so that the community at 
large can take part in it. To me this gives the impression that you avoided 
discussing it on wine-devel, because you didn't want to be convinced. Sorry. 

Ok, nuff said, going back to the technological stuff.

> One solution I have implemented and waiting on Alexandre's verdict is
> the following.
>
> Create a new library called wineunixfs. All additional entry point
> should be in that library.
> All exported function call should be of the same signiture as one in the
> core library such as GetOpenFileNameA(), GetOpenFileNameW() etc.
> To use the library, simply let winelib application link it before all
> the other core libraries.
>
> My Changes to the core libraries are contained within shell32. There is
> only one extra exported functions SHUnixFSGetDesktopFolder() being
> added. This function return the desktop folder in unix mode.
>
> Currenlt wineunixfs duplicates filedlg.c, filedlgbrowser.* and their
> dependent files from commdlg.
> I have attached the diff file for the rest of the changes that's on the
> core libraries.

I'm not the one to judge, but in my opinion this is pretty heavy weight.

Ciao,
-- 
Michael Jung
mjung at iss.tu-darmstadt.de



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