File::Spec->catdir inconsistency

[Michael Lemke]

While doing some porting I noticed this inconsistency between Unix
and VMS with catdir.
VMS> perl -e "use File::Spec::Functions; print catdir("""",'a','b');
[.a.b]
VMS> perl -e "use File::Spec::Functions; print catdir("" "",'a','b');
a:[b]
I'd expect to get an absolute path in both cases.  In fact, only the first
should give a correct answer.  On Unix it behaves as I expect:
unix> perl -e "use File::Spec::Functions; print catdir('','a','b');"'print 
"\n";'
/a/b
unix> perl -e "use File::Spec::Functions; print catdir(' 
','a','b');"'print "\n";'
 /a/b

This is with perl 5.8.2 and the File::Spec that comes with it.

This problem prevents me to do this:

catdir( split('/','/some/absolute/path') );

Or more to the point, how do you do this in a portable way:

$r = '/root';
$y = $r . '/subdir/subsubdir';
$z = $r . '/subdir1';
My idea doesn't work:

use File::Spec::Functions;

$r = catdir( split('/','/root') );
$y = catdir( $r, split('/','/subdir/subsubdir') );
$z = catdir( $r, split('/','/subdir1') );
print "\$r: $r\n\$y: $y\n\$z: $z";

That gives

$r: [.root]
$y: [.root.subdir.subsubdir]
$z: [.root.subdir1]
What I want is of course

$r: root:[000000]
$y: root:[subdir.subsubdir]
$z: root:[subdir1]
Any ideas?

Thanks,
Michael