[Bug 425] Network UNC path handling

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425

--- Comment #20 from Erik   2009-10-27 14:10:08 ---
what about faking it???

The apps fail because they are designed to require the path that they are given
to be a unc.  this does not mean that they must have full support of cifs.

Instead a viable compromise would be to remap the '\'  into the name of a
normal wine drive.  then users can externally use tools to map shares into the
wine drive space as needed.

The code change would consist of a path filter which does a simple string
substitution.  replace '\' with a normal/specific wine drive designation --
call it 'unc'.  and then hands off to the normal path handling code.

That should be a pretty quick and simple thing to implement;  simple string
substitution.

and if you wanted to go whole hog...  instead of implementing cifs which I
agree is complex, you can instead, simply hand-off the requests to smbclient. 
for instance there is a class in php that provides full samba functionality
(browse network neighborhood, connect to shares, browse/create directories, and
even transfer files) simply by sending commands to and parsing the string
responses from smbclient.  it's not that hard to do.  That way you are
leveraging the expertise of the samba group.

this would be a major win for wine.