misc/184340: PATH_MAX not interoperable with Linux

[David Cundiff]

The following reply was made to PR misc/184340; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Cundiff <dcundiff at a2hosting.com>
To: Brooks Davis <brooks at freebsd.org>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: misc/184340: PATH_MAX not interoperable with Linux
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 20:21:40 -0500

 On 11/27/2013 6:26 PM, Brooks Davis wrote:
 > On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 11:03:31PM +0000, David Cundiff wrote:
 >> Change PATH_MAX in kernel to 4096 from 1024. Should be harmless and will fix the issue in any program that uses PATH_MAX from the kernel headers. Also would allow longer 32-bit unicode paths.
 > Blindly changing PATH_MAX would be far from harmless.  It would bloat
 > many internal structures and break ABIs and thus could not be done on
 > a stable branch without quite a bit of work.  This is probalby worth
 > fixing for 11.0, ideally by removing the limit entierly as suggested by
 > POSIX.
 >
 > -- Brooks
 
 Now that you mention it both of those would be an issue(I am not much of 
 a programmer). We did just adjust it in the kernel source and several 
 structs needed to be made larger as well. We tested it, everything seems 
 to work, but who knows what other things we don't use broke. The ABI 
 change seems safe enough for my use of the OS as a backup system, 
 probably not for others.
 
 I figured I'd mention it as Linux went to 4096. I imagine their 
 reasoning was for allowing larger unicode paths. While 1024 characters 
 for a path seems pretty excessive, 256(with 4 byte characters) seems a 
 bit short.
 
 Dave