Re: UNC paths, glib, and the file chooser

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sven just filed this bug for Glib:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166577
>
> And there's a related thing for the Unix backend of the file chooser:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135877
>
> The Glib bug is about not doing the right conversion.  The file chooser
> bug is about canonicalizing filenames, which is not really Glib's job,
> but we may be able to use the same code for both parts of both tasks.
>
> Does anyone know the One True Way(tm) to UNC paths?  I have no idea of
> how they are supposed to work, either on Unix or in Windows.
>  
Internet Explorer canonicalises UNC paths to URIs as 
file://hostname/share/path, while mozilla canonicalises to 
file://///hostname/share/path.

While the IE path is a bit shorter, the five-slash version probably 
follows the specs better:

   * there is no spec for accessing file: URIs with a hostpart which
     isn't "localhost" or empty.
   * UNC paths look like parts of the file-system as far as normal file
     IO operations go (just as NFS mounts do under unix).
   * If you are going to use a host part in the URI, the scheme should
     probably be smb ...

The five-slash canonicalisation is really just applying the normal DOS 
path -> URI canonicalisation of file:///[dos path, converting '\' to '/' 
and ':' to '|'].  From reading the code, it looks like 
g_filename_from_uri() handles that fine, and g_filename_to_uri() will 
return a five-slash URI.

However, file://hostname/share/path URIs do exist on Windows, so 
g_filename_from_uri() should probably return a UNC path on Windows if a 
host part exists in the URI.

James.