id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
285	Add env.var. for entering unix penthouse	dmik		"Currently, in order to better support the Unix-like file system structure (which in turn simplifies porting of many Unix software to OS/2) the `/@unixroot` path rewrite rule is used. This pseudo-path is replaced with the value of the `UNIXROOT` environment variable which makes it possible to move the Unix file system from drive to drive w/o breaking software.

However, this technique still requires one change to the original Unix sources: you have to replace each `/` which is meant as the root of the Unix file system tree along the sources and makefiles with `/@unixroot`. This is quite annoying (as there may be dozens of places where this change is needed) and error prone (you may forget one place and this will break everything).

I suggest to extend UNIXROOT support by changing the path rewriter so that it will always treat paths starting with `/` as Unix-like paths and therefore replace `/` with the value of UNIXROOT. This will eliminate the need of prepending `/@unixroot` to them. In theory, many programs should just build and work out-of-the-box.

The only thing that we will lose with such a change is the original meaning of `/` as a reference to the root directory of the **current** drive. Though I don't think that this feature is really used by any software, it may be expected by the end user. So it sounds reasonable to make it optional (and even off by default)."	enhancement	closed	lowest	libc-0.6.6	libc	0.6.5	trivial	fixed