Cannot branch on Windows due to file path length - can I do anything?

[Nicholas Allen]

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John Arbash Meinel wrote:
| QbProg wrote:
| | If i remind it good:
| | In windows, file paths longer that MAX_PATH require a special trailing
| | sequence to allow paths and filenames of 65536 characters.
| | See MSDN for more informations...
| |
| | Good bye
| | QbProg
| | Hi,
| |
| | When trying to branch my project on Windows I get this error message:
| |
| | bzr: ERROR: [Error 206] Der Dateiname oder die Erweiterung ist zu
| | lang:
| |
|
u'D:/radical/problems-refactoring/.bzr/checkout/limbo/new-6/data/edits/ModuleImplementationTests/InterfaceConformanceTests/FixMissingClassInheritanceErrorByInheritingMoreSpecialized2/files_to_copy/modules/module_implementation/classes/private_sub_class'

|
|
| |
| |
| | It is German but it says "The filename or the extension is too
long:...."
| |
| | I assume this is due to limitations on Windows for file path lengths.
| | Is there anything I can do about this other than renaming things to
| | less descriptive names (I would rather not do this of course). I do
| | not have this problem on Linux or Mac OS/X
| |
| | Windows sucks ;-(
| |
| | Cheers,
| |
| | Nick
| |>
| |>
| |>
|
| Actually, it is a special prefix. IIRC \\?\full\path\on\filesystem causes
| Windows to bypass its normal parser and address longer files. However,
| Explorer
| will fail to browse to those paths, etc.
|
| I don't know how Nicholas managed to create such a long path by
| committing. I

That's easy I used a half decent OS - Linux ;-)

| suppose we are adding a few extra paths (.bzr/checkout/limbo/new-6).
|
| One thing you could try, Nicholas, is to just use a shorter path. I used
| to do
| my development in "C:\dev\" for other systems that were more abusive
| that Bazaar.
|
| It would be possible to fix up Bazaar to use the \\?\ notation, but it
| would
| probably be a bit invasive. We haven't tried to do it yet, because
Explorer
| itself doesn't support the longer paths. (So while *we* could support
| it, it
| doesn't help that nothing else will, though it seems that on Vista
| Explorer does
| finally support >256 char paths.)
|
| As I understand it, there are some risks of using \\?\, something about
| bypassing the standard sanity checking apis. I'm not sure if that means
| creating
| 'COM1', etc files which would do very weird things to all other problems
| that
| don't realize it.
|
|
| Also, I was playing around with it just now, and it seems python itself
| probably
| doesn't support everything about the longer paths. Specifically, I can do:
|
| os.mkdir(u'\\\\?\\' + really_long_path + '\\JustABitMore')
|
| And os.listdir() also seems to work.
|
| If you want to play around with this, it is possible that a couple small
| tweaks
| would get it to work. We could probably update
| bzrlib.workingtree.WorkingTree.abspath to return u'\\\\?\\' + path
|
| and then you would also need to update something like
| urlutils.local_path_from_url and probably local_path_to_url.
| (Specifically, the _win32* variants.)
|
| My quick hack caused problems because we started translating the "\\?\"
| to "//?/".
|
| So it might be possible (we generally work in absolute paths anyway)
but it
| would take someone with some time to really track down all of those
| places and
| make sure everything still works.

Thanks for the informative reply - I realize this is not Bazaar's fault.
It would be nice if it could support this and I would be interested in
helping but I'm always busy (as usual ;-( ) and doubt I would get much
chance to look at this...

Cheers

Nick
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