Re: Change in 28.1 in opening a file from grep results on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Pascal Quesseveur <pquessev@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2022 18:56:59 +0200
> 
>   EZ> It is IME unusual to use literal UNCs in serious development on
>   EZ> MS-Windows, precisely because cmd.exe doesn't support that well, and
>   EZ> various commands will fail depending on how you invoke them and what
>   EZ> is the working directory when you do.  Wherever I saw networked drive
>   EZ> used it was always via mapping them to a drive letter, and for a good
>   EZ> reason.
> 
>   EZ> So I still think this is the right solution, not even a workaround,
>   EZ> because the same problems will happen outside Emacs if you use cmd.exe
>   EZ> as your shell.
> 
> When I use cmd, I follow the symbolic link and I don't get problems. I
> use some IDEs which work fine also, the only problem is that regularly
> they save the absolute path in the config files, but I can manage
> that.
> 
> It's still not very consistent in Emacs. If I open a dired buffer on
> the linked directory, and open a file from the dired buffer, its path
> is that of the linked directory. If I open a file from the compilation
> buffer its path is that of the target directory.

Which is why I asked what commands you tried that gave you trouble.

Emacs assumes that the shell can access any valid file name.  Since in
this case the assumption is incorrect, things do break, and that is
not a surprise.  We could perhaps make fewer commands fail if we
understand the issue better, but there's no chance we can solve it
completely.  Which is why I think using a drive letter is a better
solution in the long run.