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