title: Why does the 260 character path length limit exist in Windows?
body: <p>I have come up against this problem a few times at inopportune moments:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Trying to work on open source Java projects with deep paths</li>
  <li>Storing deep Fitnesse wiki trees in source control</li>
  <li>An error trying to use Bazaar to import my source control tree</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Why does this limit exist? </p>
  
  <p>Why hasn't it been removed yet?  </p>
  
  <p>How do you cope with the path limit? 
  And no, switching to Linux or Mac OS X is not a valid answer to this question ;)</p>