Fix appending to Linux exes on Windows

[grandchild]

Right now, appending to a Linux (or in fact, any) executable with rice.exe on Windows will create an appendix containing "\" characters in the paths of the appended box files. This will fail when run on Linux, since "\" is not a path separator there.

This change, when appending on windows, will turn all "\" into "/". On the one hand this enables appending to Linux executables that will unpack properly, and on the other hand it will not phase Windows executables much, since "/" is a valid path separator on Windows as well.

[GeertJohan]

This feels really unsafe, does it really work as path separator on all versions of windows?

[grandchild]

I totally get your apprehension!
I started to do this the right way and quickly realized that replacing path separators semantically would have me parse escape sequences and be probably be all sorts of buggy.

Instead:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-path-formats#canonicalizing-separators
• https://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/23123-when-did-windows-start-accepting-forward-slash-path-separator#post85371

[grandchild]

The takeaway from the first link is: The Windows APIs & kernel will convert any / in paths to \.
The takeaway from the second link is: Windows (and even DOS) has always done this, the only time where it does not work is on the CMD/Batch commandline (Powershell will allow / as path separator).

[GeertJohan]

Have you tested this on a number of windows systems/versions?

[grandchild]

Hey, just to let you know I've finally gotten around to testing on some Windows platforms, and will post results here shortly. So far I haven't found any problems, but I will write it up nicely, so you (or anyone) can reproduce if wanted.

I'm also writing because Windows XP support was discontinued in Go 1.11 and actually removed in 1.12. Do you want me to test Windows XP anyway? Do you support Go 1.11 or earlier? For now I am going to test Vista, 7, 8, 10 - maybe some server version just to be sure. Let me know about XP.

[GeertJohan]

Hi @grandchild, I think we can drop support for XP... Also maybe drop Vista? I mean does anyone really use that still?

[grandchild]

There will be people still using both of those. Whether they are the same demographic that would use a current library in a new language like go, seems questionable, but there's always someone. I know that at my former company we still had some 32bit customers in 2019. They might be using a newer version, but it sounded a bit like they were using XP.

I had honestly forgotten a bit about this PR, but will get to it soon! Thanks for the reminder.