http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19873
--- Comment #16 from Michael Abbott michael@araneidae.co.uk 2009-09-03 13:04:11 --- (In reply to comment #15)
The point was that removing the z: drive mapping leads to other breakages besides this bug. Making Gecko installation not require DOS path won't help with other things.
What other breakages?
It seems to me sensible to consider making it possible for Wine to work correctly *without* a link from Windows to the rest of the system.
As it stands, wine provides a kind of jail which it can be fairly hard for applications to break out of; certainly pure Windows applications which are ignorant of Wine are likely to be jailed.
Compelling the use of Z: pointing to the root of the system completely breaks this jailing, and makes it possible for Windows applications to, perhaps quite innocently, cause all sorts of problems.
The most obvious example of this is the one I cited: a Windows application which for whatever reason decided to scan the ENTIRE file space -- I noticed because it took such a long time (and caused annoying problems with troublesome nfs mounts), and from that point I've *always* deleted Z: immediately after creating a fresh WINEPREFIX.
This issue with the broken gecko update is the only problem I've ever noticed from deleting Z:, so I think there's no reason not to fix the gecko installer's pointless dependency on a Windows concept.