Thanks. Pursuing this a bit further, from ?tar "Known problems":
The handling of file paths of more than 100 bytes. These
were unsupported in early versions of ‘tar’, and supported in
one way by POSIX ‘tar’ and in another by GNU ‘tar’ and yet
another by the POSIX ‘pax’ command which recent ‘tar’
programs often support. The internal implementation warns on
paths of more than 100 bytes, uses the ‘ustar’ way from the
1998 POSIX standard which supports up to 256 bytes (depending
on the path: in particular the final component is limited to
100 bytes) if possible, otherwise the GNU way (which is
widely supported, including by ‘untar’).
This issue is reminiscent of the "invalid uid value replaced ..."
warning, which has happened to me a lot but which CRAN has never
actually flagged when I've submitted a package:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30599326/warning-message-during-building-an-r-package-invalid-uid-value-replaced-by-that
(By the way, this thread now seems firmly on-topic for r-pkg-devel,
even if the ultimate answers must come from the CRAN maintainers ...)
cheers
Ben
On 2023-12-12 3:41 p.m., Duncan Murdoch wrote:
I don't know what the warning looks like, but the ?tar help page
discusses the issues.
Duncan Murdoch
On 12/12/2023 3:10 p.m., Ben Bolker wrote:
FWIW the R-windows FAQ says:
Yet another complication is a 260 character limit on the length of the
entire path name imposed by Windows. The limit applies only to some
system functions, and hence it is possible to create a long path using
one application yet inaccessible to another. It is sometimes possible to
reduce the path length by creating a drive mapping using subst and
accessing files via that drive. As of Windows 10 version 1607 and R 4.3,
one can remove this limit via Windows registry by setting
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled
to 1. Long paths still may not always work reliably: some applications
or packages may not be able to work with them and Windows cannot execute
an application with long path as the current directory.
I'm having trouble finding the specific check for path lengths > 100
in the R source tree. It would be helpful to have the exact wording of
the NOTE/WARNING (?) that is thrown ... (I know I could make my own
mini-package with a long path length in it somewhere but ...)
cheers
Ben Bolker
On 2023-12-12 2:57 p.m., Simon Urbanek wrote:
Justin,
now that you clarified what you are actually talking about, this is a
question about the CRAN policies, so you should really direct it to
the CRAN team as it is their decision (R-devel would be appropriate
if this was a limitation in R itself, and R-package-devel would be
appropriate if you wanted help with refactoring to adhere to the
policy). There are still path limits on various platforms (even if
they are becoming more rare), so I'd personally question the source
rather than the policy, but then your email was remarkably devoid of
any details.
Cheers,
Simon
On Dec 13, 2023, at 6:03 AM, McGrath, Justin M
<jmcgr...@illinois.edu> wrote:
When submitting a package to CRAN, it is required that path names be
shorter than 100 bytes, with the reason that paths longer than that
cannot be made into portable tar files. This error is reported by `R
CMD check --as-cran`. Since this pertains only to developing
packages, this seemed like the appropriate list, but if you don't
think so, I can instead ask on R-devel.
Best wishes,
Justin
________________________________________
From: Martin Maechler <maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 10:13 AM
To: McGrath, Justin M
Cc: r-package-devel@r-project.org
Subject: Wrong mailing list: [R-pkg-devel] Could the 100 byte path
length limit be lifted?
McGrath, Justin M
on Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:03:28 +0000 writes:
We include other software in our source code. It has some long
paths so a few of the files end up with paths longer than 100
bytes, and we need to manually rename them whenever we pull in
updates.
The 100 byte path limit is from tar v7, and since
POSIX1.1988, there has not been a path length limit. That
standard is 35 years old now, so given that there is
probably no one using an old version of tar that also
wants to use the latest version of R, could the 100 byte
limit be lifted? Incidentally, I am a big proponent of
wide, long-term support, but it's hard to see that this
change would negatively impact anyone.
Best wishes,
Justin
Wrong mailing list:
This is a topic for R-devel, not at all R-package-devel,
but be more accurate in what you are talking about, only between
the line I could read that it is about some variants of using
'tar'.
Best regards,
Martin
---
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich and R Core team
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