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Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 14:15:00 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: For masochists: the leap o faith
Message-ID: <20031115191500.GC3797@redhat.com>
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On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 01:09:00PM -0600, Brian Ford wrote:
>On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
>> Btw, I've moved this discussion here from cygwin-patches because we are
>> talking about a change which could impact a number of people.  Robert is
>> submitting patches which increase the maximum path length for NT-class
>> systems.
>>
>> My concern is that PATH_MAX will be increased for this change.  It will
>> no longer reflect the win32 api MAX_PATH value and I was wondering if
>> that would cause problems for existing applications.
>>
>Would this affect gcc -mno-cygwin?  That would seem bad.

No.  It should have no effect.  Different header files.

>> I thought the cygwin mailing list would be a wider audience for this
>> type of thing than cygwin-patches, especially since no one is offering
>> opinions in cygwin-patches.
>>
>Well, since your soliciting opinions...
>
>I don't have much of one other than I'd really prefer to keep
>PATH_MAX/MAX_PATH and define them to the largest allowable path so they
>can still be used for sizing arrays.  I don't really care if that lenght
>is not always supported.

Ok.  That was one plan.  I was concerned that a program might be assuming that
since it had carefully checked that a path was <= PATH_MAX, everything was
fine when on a Windows 98 system, it could conceivably fail.

I know that this isn't exactly a 100% safe and sanctioned use of PATH_MAX but
it seems like the possibility exists that working code could be broken by
this change.

Robert seems to be leaning towards removing the PATH_MAX define entirely
now, however.

>I would assume that any application that goes to the trouble of doing
>something other than bailing with an error in that case should actually
>use pathconf.

That's the way I'd write my code but I'm not certain that all of the currently
running code is so robust.

cgf

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