Request to shorten poolpart name and 3 digits

[cwspod]

hello, ty again for providing us with a software like this, its amazing. 

may i suggest a request to shorten the poolpart name. something like poolpart.001, poolpart.002, etc. 

the reasoning is the 260 character limit windows has.

my understanding is even with the various options flipped to make extra long locations work, it it still plagued with issues and problems. at the end of the day its best to make the project work under the 260 character limit without hacks. 

poolpart.is.33.characters.too.long vs. poolpart.001 is saving time, headaches & problems.

[Shane]

Unless an application is deliberately bypassing DrivePool to directly access a pool's internal poolparts it shouldn't (so far as I know?) be encountering MAX_PATH problems any more than it would with any other drive - i.e. as far as any app accessing the pool drive is concerned, the path of anything in the pool should begin with "p:\" not "p:\poolpart.guidstring\".

If you do have a need to use such an app to directly access the poolparts, and you can't find an alternative nor get the app's developer to fix its limitation (e.g. if the app isn't being maintained anymore?), I'd suggest opening a ticket with StableBit to make the feature request; note however that the guidstring is part of how DrivePool separates and distinguishes between poolparts across multiple pools even when moved between machines; using a short incremental counter instead would require finding a new way to implement that.

Have you run into a situation where an app with a MAX_PATH limitation needed to directly access the poolparts?

EDIT: possible workarounds also include creating 8dot3 short names for the poolparts via the fsutil command or creating junctions with short names pointing to the poolparts via the mklink command (be careful with the latter to avoid creating any recursive loop).

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Unfortunately, shorting the name isn't likely something that is gonna happen.   This ID is actually a GUID/UUID, and is used internally for ID'ing the poolpart.  For reference: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier

As for the 260 character path limit, depending on the software, you can bypass that by using the UNC naming for the folder.  Eg, instead of "D:\PoolPart.xxxx\path", use "\\?\D:\PoolPart.xxxx\path".

However, in general, you shouldn't use the poolpart folders directly.  Doing so can cause issues/conflicts down the line.  And the UNC path trick works for the pool itself too.