[Bug 25554] Could Wine live with empty WINEPREFIX?

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25554

--- Comment #6 from Andrew Nguyen  2010-12-20 13:37:32 CST ---
(In reply to comment #5)
> > set WINEPREFIX to the empty string, so there was no defect in the first place.
>
> But when you don't use WINEPREFIX, it's also empty. So i thought that correct
> handling coudl be fine, when explicitly set to empty.

The WINEPREFIX environment variable not being set and WINEPREFIX being set to
an empty string are two different conditions.

It makes sense for the user, most likely implicitly, to not state the location
of the Wine prefix, in which case Wine defaults to ~/.wine. If the user
explicitly requests a location represented by the empty string, however, Wine
can't reasonably fulfill this request, so failing is a legitimate behavior.

Also, a minor issue that this behavior could catch is a defect in a shell
script that exports WINEPREFIX but fails to set it to a reasonable value.