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Starting some notes on large paths... what's the right place?(Re: large paths in cygwin.)


Brian Dessent wrote:
btd6wi702@sneakemail.com wrote:

When will Cygwin get the ability to use large paths?

What are the roadblocks to Cygwin getting this feature?

The small limit comes from the ANSI version of the Win32 API. In order to be free of the limit Cygwin would have to consistently use the unicode versions of all Win32 API calls. And to do that right[*] means converting Cygwin to store all paths as UCS-2 internally rather than simple char arrays, which means updating/fixing any code that handles paths, of which there is a lot (and some of it quite hairy.)

I've been using rsync in Cygwin, and hit the limits of windows ASCII
file names.

Yes, it sucks.


I've seen some discussion about Cygwin getting 2^15 char long paths, but
it doesn't appear to be present in current release Cygwin, or on CVS.

It's a lot of work.



Thanks for the reply Brian, I don't doubt it's a lot of work, but I'd like to make the work a little easier for whoever fixes this problem.


As I've investigated a little previous comments about large paths in cygwin, I'm going to do a little work on trying to summarize previous commentary on the subject, so as to make it easier for any developer approaching this problem to understand what they're taking on.

If I have time I may investigate what locations in code need to be changed, and technical details of possible internal UCS-2 (Or is that UTF16 ) implementations.


Ideally I'd like to place this kind of thing in a cygwin wiki,
but as Cygwin doesn't have one, my preference is to place the notes in this mailing list, where they will be searchable.
Is this a good idea?
Is there a better place to put them?
--such as the developer's list?



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