I'd like to propose the following solution to the windows long path
problem. Before, I go into the proposal I'd like to make sure we
have a common understanding of the problem.
Windows has a limit of 256 characters for a file including the full
path and the file name. In the Geronimo 1.1 branch we moved the
unpacked configurations from the config-store/# directory into the
repository. Some of our configurations contain very long internal
path, and with the addition of the repository path we have exceeded
the windows limit.
I believe we have two issues to address: the long internal paths of
our applications make development of geronimo on windows difficult,
and the use of unpacked archives in our repository makes use of the
server on windows difficult.
Geronimo applications long internal paths:
Aaron is going to look at jaring up the WEB-INF/classes and the
compiled jsp pages in our war files.
David Jencks is going to look at either removing the generated web
service classes or putting those classes in a nested jar file.
Unpacked archives in the repository:
The solution is to not place unpacked archives in our repository. I
(dain) am going to look at using a class loader that can read from
classes and resources from jars nested in jars. Assuming we can find
or write a class loader such a class loader, we will need to assure
that Tomcat and Jetty can work from a packed archive.
Of course packed archives won't for users that want to hack jsp
pages, and for them I think we need to add support for deploying
unpacked archives *inplace*. This means that we won't copy any files
from the unpacked application to the repository. I also think we
need to work out any remaining bugs in the hot-deploy directory as
this will be the other common way to deploy applications.
What do you think?
-dain
