Based on the last extension of the record name length and its aftermath:
There is a good chance of client side tools and applications using a hard-coded maximum length for the record name. These will need recompilation (in case they use the header file from EPICS Base) or manual fixing (in all other cases).
Note also that this will add ~200 bytes to the size of every record instance, leading to an average increase of database memory consumption in the order of 20%. Which is acceptable on many systems, but not acceptable on others.
Since this may break existing IOCs, I do not expect your suggestion to be accepted into upstream Base easily.
Allowing record names of arbitrary length (i.e. allocated) would not increase memory consumption for existing installations, but needs a lot more drastic code changes in crucial places of Base, of course.
Cheers,
~Ralph
