Path length and filename length linux deficiency

Path length and filename length linux deficiency

[Stephan von Krawczynski]

Hello all,

today I want to raise a topic that seems to have vanished completely since
decades. It's the length limits of pathnames and filenames. One may wonder why
to jump onto such a seemingly dead horse. But in fact it is not. We are in a
world of continous growth of file services for clouds and other user space
apps. And in this world a friend of mine tried to do something very simple:
copying a file tree  ...  from a w*ndows file service to a linux server. And
guess what: it does not work out.
And the simple reason: the maximum path length in w*ndows systems is 32767,
whereas linux (and POSIX) talk of a maximum of 4096 bytes. It is obvious then
that linux is effectivly unable to hold a deep tree - whereas w*ndows can.
Since I do know for sure it does not work, what are the true reasons?
How can we completely drop these limits in linux (using a capable fs of
course)?
I already asked the samba list and was confirmed that the problem is known and
that there is no easy solution for it.
-- 
Regards,
Stephan