RE: Windows paths

I asked some folks at Microsoft about this, and they all confirmed that its true (one even remembers filing the bug years and years ago--guess it's still not fixed?) One possible alternative is to use the Unicode-versions of these functions (if that's an option) which may not have this limit (MAX_PATH).

-----Original Message-----
From: James Graham [mailto:james@hoppipolla.co.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2014 10:38 AM
To: public-test-infra@w3.org
Subject: 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 19:43:27 UTC