Why can't you (or node?) use the \\?\ syntax?

For anyone else like me who didn't know about this \\?\ syntax:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21194530/what-does-mean-w...

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

Node uses the Unicode functions so no need, but lots of tools in windows break (cmd.exe notably) so things like child processes don't work on long filepaths. You can actually watch `npm` write to files past the limit by using the Unicode functions, but trying to access them via child processes generally fails (and things like IDEs can't see them). The other problem is that using the longer paths turns of filepath expansion.

* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

I posted this in the comments in the blog as well:

With regards to the technicalities of max_path itself... the issue is with the .NET file I/O API, which doesn't allow you to use \\?\ paths to work around it, and is too big for our team in particular to do much about. Here's a good article that might provide a little more context (it's a little old, and these "plans" they speak of never actually materialized.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-path...

That said... we don't like it either, and we are still thinking about what we can do.

I thought connect was the official way to complain about MS things?

Technically...

- connect is for filing bugs

- uservoice is for "ideas and suggestions"

How people use it, of course, is a completely different story...

And then some teams (like us) have public issue trackers, which are the best approach if available because everything goes directly to the team: https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic

Ah I see. Yes I put a powershell bug/missing feature request on connect and looked through some other tickets. I don't envy whose reading that.

I think Ms is doomed to get people complaining about unrelated junk any time they open a platform up.

Any ideas for how a problem like that can be solved? User feedback on a closed-source project at massive scale?

I don't know. I guess you've just got to vet credentials? To avoid having a team to man the identity service perhaps;

If you need developer feedback maybe require the UX to be creating Pull requests describing the issue? Kind of like how pullup.io works?