I try to commit a folder hierarchy into out Mercurial repository, which contains files, whiches absolute path length exceeds 255 characters (Windows max. path length).
For these files I receive an error message saying
The system cannot find the path specified
We use TortoiseHG and an Eclipse plugin for Mercurial, both don't work.
Has anybody found a solution for this? (I do not want to change the repository's location on my HD)
On
See https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Win32LongFileNamesExtension (Aaron pointed to it via the mercurial-devel mailing list).
Another workaround without changing the path to the repo could be to create a second path to it by means of directory junction points. It may work because the reparsing is done at a very low level by the file system driver (or rather some installed filter), so the full (Unicode) path is known by that time and the expansion to beyond 260 characters should work fine. Give it a try. You can use the tool mklink on Windows Vista or 7 and junction.exe from Sysinternals on Windows 2000 or later. For mklink make sure to create a junction point. I'm not sure the reparsing mechanism works the same for directory symlinks (although I faintly remember that it should).
If you don't have a Unicode version of the program available, the limit is 260 characters (including drive letter part). There is nothing to get around it.
However, all ANSI functions are implemented by means of their Unicode counterpart and therefore you may get lucky by providing the full path prepended with \\?\. This may work, but likely won't because the program itself didn't consider anything beyond MAX_PATH (= 260). Ask the author to compile a Unicode version and use the prefix I mentioned. This will fix the issue.
This is a limit of the Win32 subsystem. The absolute path length limit is approximately 32,767 characters. Approximately because the object manager of Windows may expand it (symlinks in the object namespace and the likes).
On
The quick and dirty solution is to map a network drive.
For the path c:\some long path\project folder
Map \\localhost\c$\some long path\ to drive Z:\
cd z:\project folder
hg push
We are using this successfully as an interim solution, before migrating to shorter paths.
The mercurial plugins above look good but unfortunately there are numerous non-mercurial bugs related to path greater than 255 characters. For example the VS2010 failure at exactly 259 characters is a real corker!
On
I've just installed Aaron Cohen' extension, as he suggested. And it perfectly works with my TortoiseHG 2.6.1 ! Thanks, Aaron!
Though, I'd like to add a detailed guide here, because I cannot find one...
(At least here's what I did on my Win7 x64 - I'm not sure this is the shortest way possible)
setx PYTHONPATH d:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\win32lfn\src;d:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\mercurial\
cd /D D:\Python27
python d:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\win32lfn\tests\testwin32lfn.py
[extensions]
win32lfn = d:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\win32lfn\src\win32lfn.py
Windows 10 system running the mercurial 4.4.1 client
Aaron Cohen extension will work I did need make a small one small tweak
based on a comment from mhaecki on this thread: https://bitbucket.org/remleduff/win32lfn/issues/13/not-compatible-with-version-431
in the win32lfn.py file I changed:
from mercurial import util, osutil,cmdutil
from mercurial.i18n import _
to:
from mercurial import util, cmdutil
from mercurial.cext import osutil
from mercurial.i18n import _
There exists an extension which is aimed at solving this exact problem. It is: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Win32LongFileNamesExtension
It uses \\?\ style names to transparently handle long files.
I'm the author, let me know if it works for you.