File URI quandy

As I assume mostly everyone knows by now, I’ve been reading through our codebase for my online book 
at https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside-libreoffice/details 
<https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside-libreoffice/details>

I’ve lately been looking at how the OSL handles URIs (as an aside, our codebase is ancient, so 
ancient we still call them file URLs, not URIs). 

However, I’ve hit a genuine quandry. When we convert from system paths to file URIs, the RFC that 
details the file URI spec (RFC 8089) handles everything except for system paths on POSIX systems 
that start with double slashes. POSIX defines the behaviour of initial double slashes as 
implementation specific, however I cannot see anywhere in the RFC where it describes how to handle 
initial double slashes in file URIs. 

I’ve actually emailed the author of the RFC, but in case he doesn’t get back to me I thought I’d 
ask on the mailing list. This is genuinely obscure and unlikely to ever bite us on the rear, but 
one thing other than writing my book is to try to ensure our test converage caters for these corner 
cases. 

Chris