Exceeding the windows API MAX_PATH limit

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2012-04-20 14:14, Noel Grandin wrote:
> On 2012-04-20 14:04, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
>> So I'd recommend to make sure that *all* your other tools can handle 
>> long paths _first_ before proposing to change mercurial's working copy 
>> handling on Windows to use the long path api's.
> 
> The point is that these kinds of problems ARE popping up, and we (being 
> the users) don't need ALL of our tools to support long paths.
> We need just enough of the tools to support long paths such that we can 
> get through an immediate problem.
> And unfortunately, mercurial is one of the tools that we REALLY need to 
> support long paths so that we can get through tricky situations.

And how do you plan to handle these files with Explorer? Explorer can't
even *delete* a file with a path longer than 260. You would even need a
special tool to delete trees containing such files.

I also hope that you are aware that long file names / reserved file
names *inside* the store are encoded. So you only have problem in the
working directory - not in the store.