thodg/libgit2/docs/win32-longpaths.md

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core.longpaths support

Historically, Windows has limited absolute path lengths to MAX_PATH (260) characters.

Unfortunately, 260 characters is a punishing small maximum. This is especially true for developers where dependencies may have dependencies in a folder, each dependency themselves having dependencies in a sub-folder, ad (seemingly) infinitum.

So although the Windows APIs by default honor this 260 character maximum, you can get around this by using separate APIs. Git honors a core.longpaths configuration option that allows some paths on Windows to exceed these 260 character limits.

And because they’ve gone and done it, that means that libgit2 has to honor this value, too.

Since core.longpaths is a configuration option that means that we need to be able to resolve a configuration - including in the repository itself in order to know whether long paths should be supported.

Therefore, in libgit2, core.longpaths affects paths in working directories only. Paths to the repository, and to items inside the .git folder, must be no longer than 260 characters.

This definition is required to avoid a paradoxical setting: if you had a repository in a folder that was 280 characters long, how would you know whether core.longpaths support should be enabled? Even if core.longpaths was set to true in a system configuration file, the repository itself may set core.longpaths to false in its configuration file, which you could only read if core.longpaths were set to true.

Thus, core.longpaths must only apply to working directory items, and cannot apply to the .git folder or its contents.


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