>
> To do this, we'd have to drag this support all the way down to the
> lowest level where we pass file names to the OS APIs.  And then we'd
> have to disallow root directories of one letter, like C:/c, which are
> entirely legitimate.  All that just to handle the few commands during
> the build process that need it.  I find this solution even more ugly
> than the unmsys--file-name gork.


I'm afraid I don't understand your point here. To reiterate, the current
problem is that Emacs does not know how to treat "/C" in the beginning,
therefore it assumes that the path given does not have a drive letter, so
it add "c:" in front of the given path as a wild guess. The only thing that
I propose to change in that logic is to allow paths which contain a slash +
a single letter in the beginning, e.g. "/C", so that when Emacs sees it, it
simply converts that to "C:" and passes further to old logic of path
manipulation. In other words, nothing has to be changed to the lowest level
as you say. My change involves one `if' statement or so in the very
beginning of the path processing. Furthermore, I don't get it why you would
have to disallow "C:/c"? If somebody passes "C:/c" then it's perfectly
valid Windows path. If somebody passes "/C/c", then according my proposal
it will be converted to "C:/c" and then processed further.