14 Mar
2015
14 Mar
'15
6:13 p.m.
I believe Steve meant that b2 uses the fopen/fread/fwrite series of C standard library functionality for cross-platform purposes and it is this which imposes the limit to the filespec path. Obviously b2 could try to use the same NT kernel API which AFIO uses to get around the 256 character limitation if cross-platform programming were not the issue.
I suspect it's more pernicious than that: bjam surely invokes the system's shell to execute commands, and it's there in cmd.exe that we're hitting the issues? John.