Re: svn client and long filenames on Windows

Graham Leggett wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2007 3:05 pm, Peter Lundblad wrote:
>
>> Is it possible to turn your tool into submitting absolute paths to svn?
>
> The tool is Apache Maven http://maven.apache.org, so getting it changed
> will involve convincing the maven people to do it.
>
> Can you give an example of what you mean by submitting absolute paths?
>
> My understanding is that no path in Windows can exceed 256 characters in
> length, so an absolute path will (in theory) not work either. In am also
> not a Windows person, so I cannot be sure on this either.

The limitation of 250-some characters is true for relative paths (that is,
paths whose target determination is dependent upon the location from which
the path is evaluated:

    "foo.c"
    "..\bar\foo.c"

These are relative paths because if I'm at a CMD shell and I type "notepad
foo.c" then NOTEPAD.EXE is going to assume I mean the "foo.c" sitting in my
current working directory. If I change to a different working directory and
type "notepad foo.c", NOTEPAD.EXE will look in *that* directory for a file
called foo.c.

Windows, however, allows you something like 65k bytes if you use UNC
notation and an absolute path, which APR does (on most systems) for you. An
absolute path is one that, for a given drive letter, is unambiguous. I can
be "in" any directory on the C: drive and type "notepad C:\bar\foo.c" and
get the same foo.c loaded into NOTEPAD.EXE every time.

So, the recommendation here is that in your build scripts, don't do
something like:

   svn checkout http://myserver.com/repos/trunk working-copy

because "working-copy" is relative to your current working directory.

Instead, do:

   svn checkout http://myserver.com/repos/trunk C:\Projects\working-copy

because there can be no question about where C:\Projects\working-copy is --
it's an absolute path.

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato@collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand