[PATCH 0 of 1 v4] win32lfn: allow manipulating files with long names on Windows

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Mon Jan 24 17:34:39 CST 2011


On Mon, 2011-01-24 at 01:11 -0500, Aaron Cohen wrote:
> Phew, this took a bit longer to get together than I expected.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has reviewed though!
> 
> I've created a bitbucket repo: http://bitbucket.org/remleduff/win32lfn

So here's where I am on this. Possible options are:

a) add it to hgext/, with whatever level of support that implies
b) add it to contrib/, with whatever lesser level of support that
implies, possibly moving to hgext/ in the future
c) add it to Extensions on the wiki, possibly moving to hgext/ in the
future

It's obviously really frustrating for us that Windows is so broken in
regards to just about everything related to filenames. So it's really
attractive to bypass a big chunk of that with UNC-style names. On the
other hand, the support for such things is desperately thin, starting
with Explorer, and it's hard to see how filenames that aren't even
browsable/deletable with Explorer are going to be viable.

Currently, we don't get much complaint about long file names, so I don't
think there's enough demand for us to justify the potential support cost
of having this in-tree. So my inclination is for this to live
out-of-tree until we find ourselves recommending it to people on a
regular basis.

By the way, you should probably give some thought to how this relates to
the win-utf8 extension or whatever it's called, which is almost but not
quite orthogonal.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.




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