Sometimes, depending on where is located your repository folder on your drive and what is the file tree of your project, you could face errors because you exceed the 259 characters limit of NTFS file system.
These errors could be :
TF205022: The following path contains more than the allowed 259 characters:C:/Very/Long/Path/.git/tfs/default/workspace/Very/Long/Path/To/SubFolder/file.txt. Specify a shorter path.
or
Failed to stat file 'C:/Very/Long/Path/.git/tfs/default/workspace/Very/Long/Path/To/SubFolder/file.txt': The system cannot find the file specified.
This is due to the fact that git-tfs use a temp folder located in the folder .git/tfs/default/workspace (default is use for the main branch but, if you use TFS branch feature of git-tfs, other --longer?-- folders following the branch name are used) where it create files received from TFS to create the git commits. The path of the files could became quickly very long...
Note: If you look for this folder, you surely couldn't find it because it is created and deleted when a git-tfs command is run!
A first simple solution could be to move your folder from a very long path to a shorter one.
For example, move your repository folder from :
C:\A\Very\Very\Long\Path\To\My\GitTfs\Repository to C:\repo.
Another better solution if you faced this problem is to use a custom workspace directory!
You could set the workspace directory when cloning the tfs repository using the --parameter option :
git tfs clone http://server/tfs $/Project/trunk project --workspace="c:\ws"
To set a custom workspace directory, you could also run the command (in a already existing repository):
git config git-tfs.workspace-dir c:\ws
Note:
- if you set this setting after having faced an error perhaps you should run a cleanup before fetching again (
git tfs cleanup) - the
--parameteroption is also available with theinitcommand