Keep drive letter in mapped network drive on Windows

[OlivierArgentieri]

Context:

We are trying to wrap some of our softwares in rez packages, theses packages are on one nfs network drive.
So on windows we have mapped a drive letter to this network storage.

In my rezconfig i have:
(packages_path fromrez config output)

...
packages_path:
- C:\Users\oargentieri\packages
- Y:/rez_package
...

Examples:

In this example we will try to launch a software, that doesn't support UNC path, here for our example, vscode.

With this setup, when i write rez env vscode then where code
i can see the binary path but, this is a full network path, of my drive letter Y.

\\<server>\rez\rez_package\vscode\1.42\platform-windows\bin\code

And what i expect is:

Y:/rez_package\vscode\1.42\platform-windows\bin\code

Investigation:

So to understand what happen here, we have search in the code of rez and we found something:
here in the rez code
os.path.realpath('Y:/') will return the full network path instead of our mapped drive letter.

So locally we have edited this file to change:
path = os.path.normpath(os.path.realpath(path))
with:
path = os.path.normpath(path)

Just for our test and investigation

And it works !:

resolved packages:
platform-windows  y:\rez_package\platform\windows
vscode-1.42       y:\rez_package\vscode\1.42\platform-windows
> where code
y:\rez_package\vscode\1.42\platform-windows\bin\code

But i really don't like to customize rez code to match this use case.

Questions:

So now, i'm creating this thread just to explain my issue and what we found, to know if you have any better way to do this ?
To keep our mapping drive on windows, in the resolved context and binary path, because some of our software cannot be run on UNC path (VSCode or RV for example)

Thank you !

[OlivierArgentieri]

I have created this PR and a new issue #1541 for this, but i don't know if it'had to be done like that.

I have tested this code locally, generated a new rez install from this fork/PR and it's work.

[OlivierArgentieri]

The behavior of os.path.realpath has changed since python 3.8.0