Windows long path repos: robocopy, FAT32

Adrian Buehlmann adrian at cadifra.com
Fri Jun 20 13:24:06 CDT 2008


I can report a couple of good news from the long path front.

The Windows command line tool robocopy [1], available for free by Microsoft,
can copy long path trees, also to/from FAT32.

I was able to a copy a local clone (did hg clone -U, see my patch)
of http://www.cadifra.com/cgi-bin/repos/long2/

from my Windows XP SP3 NFTS harddisk

(1) to another dir on that same harddisk
(2) to my 4GB USB memory stick formatted with FAT32

and back.

I was also able to hg clone -U that repo directly from
http://www.cadifra.com/cgi-bin/repos/long2/ to said USB
stick.

I successfully hg verified all repos after copying (on FAT32 stick
and on NTFS disk).

Furthermore, I can report that I can *move* a clone of said long2
into another dir on the *same* drive by dragging it with explorer
(both on NTFS and FAT32).

So, I think these are a couple of very nice things.

A thing that doesn't work (yet, I hope) is hg clone from
disk to stick. But I am pretty confident that I should be able to
fix that.

What's really missing is a "hg destroy" or something like that
which deletes a repo dir with all its content.

-- 
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

robocopy even has an option relating to long paths:
'''
 /256 :: turn off very long path (> 256 characters) support.
'''



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