Brion-
A possible alternative which has been brought up
before is to avoid
changing the structure of the old table, rather pullings its
non-textual data out to a separate table and continuing to use the old
table (unaltered) as a store for old_text. This avoids copying around
the most data and should in theory be faster.
How about doing a quick hack now instead, such as adding a "sysop_move"
flag to cur_restrictions which would then make certain pages only be
movable by sysops? This until we do a proper database redesign, where we
would then convert the existing DB into the new schema in one well-
coordinated step, with associated downtime.
Personally, I'd prefer a transition without downtime such as the one I
proposed before, but nobody seemed interested enough to discuss it.