Windows paths

In a rare case of a platform surfacing even more bizarre legacy than the 
web, it seems that there is still a limitation of 260 characters for 
paths in many Windows functions. Although you can supposedly work around 
this by opting in to a long path format, it's not clear that this works 
with all relevant versions of Windows, or applications. In particular it 
seems to be considered problematic to use this long form on Mozilla 
build infrastructure. At the very least I can't see any evidence that it 
is successfully being used anywhere.

It seems then that the only solution might be to limit path lengths in 
web-platform-tests to 260-X characters, where X is the number of 
characters required for system-specific stuff. I'm not *precisely* sure 
what X Mozilla require (I will work it out soon), but I think it is 
around 100.

At present the longest path in web-platform-tests seems to be 164 
characters:

/html/semantics/scripting-1/the-template-element/parsing-html-templates/clearing-the-stack-back-to-a-given-context/clearing-stack-back-to-a-table-body-context.html

What requirements do others have here? Is there a better solution that I 
am missing?

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2014 17:37:59 UTC