Netbeans hates Windows
Most ror developers work on Mac or Linux systems. But I’m a Windows user. Not because I have any allegiance to Microsoft but because in my career my clients have been primarily Windows based.
For the most part, I’ve been able to find workarounds and have escaped unscathed from platform issues. But Netbeans has let me down… again.
Netbeans 6.5 gave me grief when trying to use the debugger. You can read about it here. Now, Netbeans 6.7 is giving me trouble checking out my project from subversion. It doesn’t seem to recognize the main project folder and the directory structure is wonky.
After much experimentation and swearing, I bypassed the IDE and instead tried to checkout via the Dos prompt. This results in a unhelpful error message that disguises the root of the problem.
svn: Your .svn/tmp directory may be missing or corrupt; run 'svn cleanup' and try again svn: Can't open file "long filename": The system cannot find the path specified.
Subversion libraries use relative paths. This is a problem on windows since it only supports path names under the 255 char limit. So, if you are trying to check out a project with a deep directory structure or perhaps you like your folder and file names to be *very* descriptive, you’ll run across an error like the one above.
Yes, this is a limitation of the file system but why can’t Netbeans feed subversion an absolute path when running svn commands instead of a relative path? Then I wouldn’t be wasting my precious dev time on config issues. Arg!
The work around is to use TortoiseSVN on Windows since it feeds subversion absolute paths.
*whew* Another bullet dodged. It’s long passed time to install Linux…
3 comments July 14th, 2009
