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

[James Walker]

Matt Mackall wrote:

> It's mostly a problem with path length, actually. Filenames can be 255
> characters, but the total path length is limited to 260. Or something
> like that. And if someone makes a repository with deeper and deeper
> paths over time, most of the directory hierarchy will exist when we hit
> the limit.

Isn't this only quantitatively different from other OSes, not 
qualitatively different?  On the Mac, file names can be 255 Unicode 
characters, but MAX_PATH is 1024 (which I think means UTF-8 characters). 
  One can create and manipulate deeper hierarchies using the Carbon 
APIs, which are not path-based, but not using the path-based BSD and 
Cocoa APIs.