Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Planned move to Arch (cygwin issue) ...

[John Kinson]

Robert Collins wrote:
> "You mean this.txt" ? Got them for years and years.
> "You .... 257 characters later.txt" ? Don't have them, see the previous
> thread for a discussion on whats needed.

I've been looking at running tla under Cygwin, and I've run into the 
same problems.

Just to test it out myself, I wrote my own mkdir command-line executable 
using an old copy of Dev Studio 6.0 on Win2k.  I couldn't actually find 
documentation on the CreateDirectoryW interface, only references to it 
in the CreateDirectory documentation.  What I did discover however, is 
that simply by prepending "\\?\" to the path, the Win32 CreateDirectory 
(not CreateDirectoryW) routine _was_ able to create a long pathname (and 
was not able to do this without the leading "\\?\") - at least for my 
copy of DevStudio.

The path I tested was the path that caused "tla import" to fail when I 
imported the tutorial files (as described in 
http://regexps.srparish.net/tutorial-tla/importing-first.html).  I was 
using a working directory of "/c/arch/wd/hello-world" - a short path in 
itself.  The path that caused the import to fail was 
"C:\arch\wd\hello-world\,,address@hidden@yellowradio.com--SCM\patch-log"

What concerns me is that even if Cygwin is modified to support creation 
of long paths, Windows Explorer is unable to perform any operations on 
any portion of the path that is longer than 248 characters, other than 
display the directory entries.  For example, having used my own mkdir 
executable to create a directory ".../patch-log/Foo" using the above 
path, any attempt to create a file within that directory, or rename the 
directory, failed.  More importantly, any attempt to copy any portion of 
the tree failed with an error message, leaving a partial copy.

This means that Windows users run the risk of breaking their arch trees 
if they contain deep paths, unless they exclusively use a fixed version 
of Cygwin.

Rather than fixing Cygwin, I think the right solution must be to fix 
Windows :)

Or maybe being unable to use Windows Explorer on an arch repository is a 
good thing?

JK
--
http://www.yellowradio.com/
What if the Hokey Cokey really _is_ what it's all about?