On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
The current mix of limits between the HTML form field length and DB field length is known to not be an exact match; it's an approximate compromise.
There would however *be* no strict need to limit the summary length if the DB field is expanded -- going from VARCHAR or TINYBLOB out to BLOB will make pretty much arbitrarily large text possible.
If a limit is still desired, the most sensible thing would simply be to trim it at whatever huge number of characters you like. This can be done with the $wgContLang->trim() function on submission.
That would be . . . a dramatically simpler and cleverer way of doing things. I like it. :D Are you (or someone) willing to do the schema change? I'll commit some code to truncate log comments by byte count now, so that the status quo doesn't dramatically change if some bot commits really long log summaries and relies on current behavior, and the schema is changed to allow long log summaries. If the schema changes are okay with you, I'd be happy to write up the code to do the configurable client- and server-side limiting.