[Bug 38468] New: Allow navigating to folders with colon in their name

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38468

Bug ID: 38468
           Summary: Allow navigating to folders with colon in their name
           Product: Wine
           Version: 1.7.38
          Hardware: x86
                OS: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: -unknown
          Assignee: [e-mail]
          Reporter: [e-mail]
      Distribution: ---

Right now, the current implementation of GVFS mounts samba folders in paths
like:

/run/user/<UID>/smb-share:server=hostname,share=sharename/

Some Windows apps don't work fine with those characters in the path.

For example, if I want to install something I have in that share and I run the
`setup.exe` file from `wine explorer`, it works; but if I run it from `wine
uninstaller`, it fails saying that characters "/:<>|" are forbidden in paths.

Also, if I installed MS Excel and try to open a .xslx file from a samba share
in Nautilus (right button > open with > MS Excel), it fails saying that it
cannot find the file.

This makes the UX very uncomfortable, because the user needs to copy the file
to a local drive, edit it, and then copy it back to the network share.

Independently if Bug 34748 gets fixed or not, IMHO wine itself should do
something with Linux paths containing those characters, the same way it does
when transforming "/" to "" or when dealing with uppercase/lowercase files.

[Bug 38468] Allow navigating to folders with colon in their name

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38468

François Gouget  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |NEW
                 CC|                            |[e-mail]
     Ever confirmed|0                           |1

--- Comment #1 from François Gouget  ---
I have collected some data on this.

/run/user/<UID>/smb-share:server=hostname,share=sharename/

In the path below '/run/user/<UID>' is the gvfs mount point and
'smb-share:server=hostname,share=sharename' is a virtual directory created by
gvfs when one 'mounts' the corresponding Samba share.

So I'm not sure Wine would get a notification when the 'smb-share:...'
directory gets created. Still the gvfs documentation says that it uses UDisks2
and the source code does contain quite a few references to UDisks2. So there's
hope that Wine can turn these into drive letters and thus 'hide' the colon in
the path.

Another point has to do with the error one gets when double-clicking on a
filename containing a colon in the File -> Open dialog. It comes from a check
in the first lines of FILEDLG95_ValidatePathAction() in
dlls/comdlg32/filedlg.c. Removing that check makes it possible to open a
filenames containing a colon in Wine's notepad application. But Excel 2000
still refuses to open such filenames. So either there are other checks
elsewhere, or Excel itself does not deal well with such filenames. So it seems
there's no single-line hack that would workaround this issue for most
applications.

Any 'path mangling' approach would obviously have to be done at a much lower
level. Maybe it could leverage the short vs. long filename support but that's
not clear.

[Bug 38468] Allow navigating to folders with colon in their name

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38468

--- Comment #2 from Yajo  ---
> So there's hope that Wine can turn these into drive letters and thus 'hide' the colon in the path.

That would be great, in fact it's how Windows works.

The only workaround I found for now is to manually symlink those locations to a
place without comma.

[Bug 38468] Allow navigating to folders with colon in their name

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38468

--- Comment #3 from François Gouget  ---
See the links below for past and current attempts at changing the GVFS policy
on this:

* Bug 723399 - Names of gvfs-fuse directories should be more application
friendly
   Contains a proposed patch from a GNOME developer.
   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723399

* Bug 949906 - Colons in automatically created names by gvfs-fuse cause
problems
   An old 2013 attempt that did not get far but was unrelated to Wine.
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=949906