Python 2.7 is all but set in stone. Changes to its behavior have to correct serious bugs, not work around limits in an OS. You can do that yourself. For example, use an extended local-device path, i.e. a path that's prefixed by u"\\\\?\\". This path type must be unicode, fully-qualified, and use only backslash as the path separator. Also, the UNC device has to be used explicitly. Python 2 has poor support for unicode raw strings (\u and \U escapes aren't disabled), so you can instead use forward slashes and normpath(). For example: 

    f1_path = os.path.normpath(u"//?/UNC/tst/tc/proj/MTV/cs_fft/Milo/Fries/STL/BLNA/F1") 
    log_path = os.path.join(f1_path, log_filename)
    assert os.path.isfile(log_path)