Microsoft Windows has Universal Naming Convention (UNC) paths, see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-path-formats#unc-paths

The Rust standard library normalizes paths to this form when calling std::fs::canonicalize, see https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/fs/fn.canonicalize.html

However, some programs, do not parse these paths correctly, including our ally git:

$ git clone \\?\C:\Users\lorenz\tmp
Cloning into 'tmp'...
ssh: Could not resolve hostname \\\\?\\c: No such host is known.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

The dunce crate solves the problem of having to deal with normalization and avoiding weird UNC paths for us. Note that on non-Windows platforms, it behaves exactly like std::fs::canonicalize!

Looks good to me

Rebased