Re: Windows path limits, was Re: [PATCH v5 2/5] setup: sanity check file size in read_gitfile_gently

From

Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

Date

Apr 28, 2015, 16:20 UTC

Message-ID

<c33a7d869ecfb49d0b548f895d0f5da3@www.dscho.org>

In-Reply-To

<CAEtYS8QMSSbfd2xSCMh2YTW2NSz7uBnsmKUi9SjSCrJ1TBEH+w@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On 2015-04-28 17:33, Doug Kelly wrote:

> If you're able to do everything through the Unicode Win32 APIs, you can reach 65535 characters, assuming the filesystem supports it (NTFS does, FAT32 would not, for example).  I recall there being one function (possibly thinking of mktemp) that couldn't properly handle the long paths, but I believe that was it.

IIRC the MSDN documentation of at least one of the directory-related functions was not quite guaranteeing that it would support long paths with all Windows versions, either.

> Other apps may or may not handle the longer paths well; the core.longpaths
> switch may prevent mishaps in more than just Explorer, but the downside isn't
> disaster always either -- for example, Explorer just refuses to browse
> to that path.

The problem comes from a different angle, though: I had *a lot* of fun when working on the tests for the `core.longpaths` feature because our very own `rm.exe` would not handle the long paths. As a consequence, quite a few tests failed to remove the trash directories of previous, failed test runs.

In such a case you will have to resort to use different tools than you are used to, and *that* is the reason why we do not enable that feature by default.