Eric, the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.I do actually use the NT name space in ntdll (NtCreateFile takes a NT path name). Didn't you notice that the dosdevices and device subdirectories are actually part of the NT name space itself ? (on latest NT, dosdevices is in fact a symlink to ??). What the patch somehow implements is NT symlinks (in NT name space) as unix symlinks in the ${WINEPREFIX} directory...
In my quick read of the patch I didn't see any translating from the Win32 namespace to the NT namespace; do you plan to do anything there?
it is (check RtlDosPathNameToNtPathName_U)To pick a (bad) example, the name \\server\share\file is valid in the Win32 namespace, but not in the NT namespace; it must be translated to \??\UNC\server\share\file
as far as today, SMB hasn't been correctly incorporated in the patch (it should be moved to ntdll, and rewritten to take paths in the NT form rather than the DOS form). I haven't done it so far.Since you mentioned SMB, I will too: don't worry too much, it's currently broken anyway. As long as the code's cleaner it should be easier to fix (and this looks much cleaner).
A+
