Re: Long paths for tablespace leads to uninterruptible hang in Windows

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> Well, that sucks. So it's a Windows bug.
>>
>> It's not clear to me that we should do anything about this at all,
>> except perhaps document that people should avoid long tablespace
>> path names on an unknown set of Windows versions. We should not
>> be in the business of working around any and every bug coming out
>> of Redmond.
>
> It's sort of incomprehensible to me that Microsoft has a bug like this
> and apparently hasn't fixed it. But I think I still favor trying to
> work around it. When people try to use a long data directory name and
> it freezes the system, some of them will blame us rather than
> Microsoft. We've certainly gone to considerable lengths to work
> around extremely strange bugs in various compiler toolchains, even
> relatively obscure ones. I don't particularly see why we shouldn't do
> the same here.

I agree we'll probably want to work around it in the end, but I still
think it should be put to Microsoft PSS if we can. The usual - have we
actually produced a self-contained example that does just this (and
doesn't include the full postgres support) and submitted it to
*microsoft* for comments? Not talking about their end user forums, but
the actual microsoft support services? (AFAIK at least EDB, and
probably other pg companies as well, have agreements with MS that lets
you get access to their "real" support. I know I used to have it at my
last job, and used it a number of times during the initial porting
work. The people backing that one are generally pretty good)

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/