Bug#587377: debian-policy: Decide on arbitrary file/path names limit

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Sean Finney wrote:

> Having a warning in lintian for arbitrarily long (perhaps >= 256)
> filenames is totally reasonable i'd say, but there's no reason to
> otherwise throw out limits for the sake of having them.

Oh, I don't know.

Now that I check, the path provoking this was 269 characters
(including leading '.').  I'm able to install the package, both on
tmpfs and ext4, without trouble.  I suppose it would be interesting to
know: what was the environment like in which it failed to rename(2)?
E.g., what filesystem?

The ustar format only supports 256 character path names; but dpkg also
supports data.tar.gz using the GNU format, which supports longer.

Now I'm starting to worry that it might have been the length of the
filename rather than the pathname that triggered Bug#587440.  But the
filename was only 234 characters, which should certainly be safe, even
on filesystems like ubifs.  Ideas?

Puzzled,
Jonathan