msys2 and spaces

[dcraig327]

Thank you for creating MSYS2. I have a question from the documentation for Installation. https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-installation/ that I searched here and other places and couldn't find an answer.

MSYS2 ships in the form of installers and base archives. They can be installed or extracted to any place on your computer, but you MUST use folder names that consist of only ascii characters and no spaces (also it makes good sense to put it in a path that doesn't use many characters due to PATH_MAX being 260; C:\msys32 or C:\msys64 is ideal). You can download the installers or base MSYS2 archives from the links below:

Would you mind expanding on that a bit more. Perhaps in the installation page or here. The limits described, no spaces, no unicode, 260 characters sounds like the limits from FAT filesystems:

Depends on whether the FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 implementation has support for LFNs. Where it does not, as in OS/2, DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 in DOS-only mode and the Linux "msdos" driver, file names are limited to 8.3 format of 8-bit OEM characters (space padded in both the basename and extension parts) and may not contain NUL (end-of-directory marker) or character 5 (replacement for character 229 which itself is used as deleted-file marker). Short names also must not contain lowercase letters. A few special device names (CON, NUL, AUX, PRN, LPT1, COM1, etc.) should be avoided, as some operating systems (notably DOS, OS/2 and Windows) reserve them.

The mention of linux "msdos" driver, does that describe msys2?
I did find mention of this in mingw's archived installation notes:

MinGW may have problems with paths containing spaces, and if not, usually other programs used with MinGW will experience problems with such paths. Thus, we strongly recommend that you do not install MinGW in any location with spaces in the path name reference; i.e. you should avoid installing into any subdirectory of "Program Files" or "My Documents", or the like.

I'm curious and can't find an answer is all. Thank you.

[lazka]

Would you mind expanding on that a bit more. Perhaps in the installation page or here. The limits described, no spaces, no unicode, 260 characters sounds like the limits from FAT filesystems:

260 is the default Windows path limit (MAX_PATH). You can work around that by using different APIs + registry changes, but not every tool supports it. The spaces thing is likely due to badly written bash scripts, because many Linux tools assume there are no spaces in the prefix.