Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tla1.2 on cygwin

[Pat Galea]

address@hidden wrote:
> To clarify for all: NTFS does support path lengths to 32000 chars, but
> there's a catch.
>
> On Windows, for each function, there is an ANSI version, and a Unicode
> version. For example:
> CreateFileA(char* path) and CreateFileW(w_char* path)
> If one uses the CreateFileW() function, and the path starts with "\\?\"
> then the path can be 32000 chars. If the path starts with something else
> it is limited to 250 chars.

As a warning for anyone trying to use these interfaces, there's a
problem with SetCurrentDirectoryW. It supports the syntax for Unicode
paths, but doesn't appear to work with long paths.

This caused a big problem when I was attempting to update Cygwin. I
still think that Cygwin can be made to work (and it'll be great when it
does), but I realised that in order to get round the
SetCurrentDirectoryW problem I'd need to know a *lot* more about Cygwin
than I actually do.

I'm now using SFU on Win2K very successfully. No problems at all so far.

There are instructions on the wiki for building tla on SFU:

http://wiki.gnuarch.org/moin.cgi/W32ServicesForUnixCompile

Granted, this solution does work on a limited number of OSs (e.g. Win2k,
XP Pro), but if you happen to be using one of these, SFU-arch is a good
combination.

At the moment, SFU-arch is (AFAIK) the only 'Windows' solution that uses
the tla source code almost verbatim (just one extra #include is needed).

(Which, of course, is not to denigrate either Lode Leroy's ingenious
path-compression, or Johannes' excellent work on a native Win32 port.)

Regards,
Pat Galea