I was unzipping boost 1.55 on my Windows machine, into what I thought was a reasonable location. 7-zip eventually complained about a file that it could not write because the path was too long. Most APIs on Windows restrict paths to ~260 characters. The longest file in the boost 1.55 release is the following: boost_1_55_0\libs\geometry\doc\html\geometry\reference\spatial_indexes\boost__geometry__index__rtree\rtree_parameters_type_const____indexable_getter_const____value_equal_const____allocator_type_const___.html This is 207 characters long. Next on the list are a whole bunch of html and png documentation files, all with length 174. Here is one example: boost_1_55_0\doc\html\images\accumulators\structboost_1_1accumulators_1_1detail_1_1is__tail__variate__feature_3_01tag_1_1tail__variate_3_01bd5040caa5e48b0af425af2314206bf.png As you may notice, the end of that particular file ends in a uuid / guid. It may be as easy as making that uuid appear 30 or 40 characters sooner in the path. ************************************************************************************************************** Is it unreasonable to ask that the boost zip only use half (130 characters) of the available Windows path size for itself? ************************************************************************************************************** On a related note, is it unreasonable to ask that an --abbreviate-paths build of boost limit itself to 130 characters? I acknowledge that this one is a bit harder to solve as there can be a large number of build "pivots" that all add to the path, but some clients (like me) need to layer other build pivot and version information on top of what boost already provides, and I need some amount of character wiggle room to make that happen. This isn't currently in as bad of a shape as the zip file. For an outdated piece of information, my win64 builds of boost 1.50 have a path part of 151 characters. boost\bin.v2\libs\test\build\msvc-11.0\rls\adrs-mdl-64\async-excpt-on\dbg-symbl-on\lnk-sttc\thrd-mlt\libboost_unit_test_framework-vc110-mt-1_50.lib.rsp Is there significant value in putting "bin.v2\libs" in the path?