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

[Talden]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 7:08 AM, Lukáš Lalinský <lalinsky at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  On Po, 2008-03-10 at 18:52 +0100, Nicholas Allen wrote:
>  > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>  > Hash: SHA1
>  >
>  > I think it is "\\?\" from a bit of googling. Should bazaar be doing this
>  > for then (as it is Bazaar that is building the path and not me)?
>
>  Using \\?\ has one little disadvantage, Windows itself (Explorer,
>  cmd.exe, ...) can't read such files with long paths. :)

IMHO

Given this limitation it's far, far too soon to consider altering
Bazaar to use these longer paths - Moving branches around or archiving
them up to transport them would become a real problem.  Unfortunately
Windows users, myself including, are just going to have to accept that
they cannot use paths of such lengths.

The tool should not utilise the filesystem in a non-obvious manner -
this will only server to confuse users further.

Maybe once the majority of Windows users have moved to Vista (and the
devil's wearing a scarf and mittens)   bazaar can start looking at
supporting longer paths on Windows.

As noted you can alleviate the problem a little if you've started with
a longish path as the root of your branch. Make it shorter.

EG instead of "c:\development\workspace\bazaar-vcs.org\bzr.dev\..."
you might use "c:\ws\bzr.dev".

--
Talden