Windows people: please help check idea for a new Mercurial repository layout

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Sat Jun 14 17:10:25 CDT 2008


2008/6/14 Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com>:
> The requirements you pile here are such that it makes using Mercurial
> on Windows impossible.

Hmm, hardly. Mercurial is perfectly usable on Windows right now. There
are some issues, certainly, but they can be resolved with some effort.
The issue here is to avoid more repository format changes than are
necessary. If 2 issues need repo format changes, let's solve them
together to avoid 2 repo format changes.

> Why? Again, we have lived with the path length limit for quite some time
> now. Why is that limit suddenly unacceptable anymore, up to the point
> that you jump on things like using \\?\.. paths, which are known to
> cause severe problems for Windows users?

You can argue the same about reserved filenames. I have never had a
problem with either. Why is reserved filenames more urgent than long
paths?

> You have tortured Paul and me about requirements to be able to copy
> repos around onto ancient file systems (re case folding patches).

Please don't bring me into this! I have no issues with how Matt
handled the case folding patches, and in any case I don't think the 2
cases are comparable.

> And there are a whole lot of projects that can live with the current path
> length limit. They could even live with the new, a bit smaller
> path limit that results if we add a period in front of every path component
> in the store, so that we can clone repos containing reserved filenames.

But 99.9% of projects can live with the current issues with reserved
filenames as well.

> And the technical solution would be simple. If we don't go over board with
> requirements we currently don't fulfill, and many users of Mercurial can
> live with and have lived with and would be happy to continue to live with.

I think you need to take a step back and calm down. Have a break and
come back to this with a fresh view.

Paul.


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