Yesterday I copied an InstallAware Project on the Jenkins continuous integration server. The copy always failed to build while the original succeeded. They were really the same at this point, so WTF!!!
In the InstallAware forum I found out that the path name was getting too long. Well, yes, the name of the copied jenkins project was slightly longer and thus the resulting path had some more characters.
In the installaware forum they say that Windows still has a limit of 256 character for absolute paths. According to Wikipedia, the limitation doesn’t come from the filesystem. So it must be somewhere in the OS. Now, Microsoft told us that WindowsNT which Windows7 is based on, was no longer based on MS DOS. Were they lying? I mean, this is a 64 bit operating system with limitations from its 16 bit pre-pre-pre-pre-predecessor….
A co worker ran into the same limitation lately when trying to copy a folder structure from linux to Windows.
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