url_alias table fields are too small

1 year late - but you might need to bear this in mind:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.2

They say that a URI can be any length - however some old proxies might have trouble with ones over 255 characters. I've also heard that Google and Co aren't keen on them being more than 128.

I have spent a LOT of time researching URLs (see my Well Designed URLs Initiative) including time monitoring and participating on the URL mailing list uri@w3c.org and at this point there are very few if any proxies that can't handle longer URLs. You've got to remember that the RFC you quoted was written in 1999, and even back then they were referring to old proxies. Anytime I've seen conversation comes up regarding length of URLs in the past five years everyone has admitted that there is no longer any reasonable need to limit URLs to 128 characters.

OTOH, URLs longer than 128 character really offer poor usability for the user so I would ideally avoid them at all cost. But for a generic URL architecture that follows a set of patterns, making it possible for URLs to be longer than 128 characters would avoid situations where the pattern generates URLs longer than 128 characters and thus breaks the architecture of a site.

There is another issue with the size of the edit field for editing the urls from the url_alias page in the admin/sitebuilding menu. The field has max size set as 64 char. I am using drupal 5.1 and the path module id is
; $Id: path.info,v 1.3 2006/11/21 20:55:34 dries Exp $.
I am uploading the modified path.module which alllows 128 chars while editing.

Any plans to making url_alias field longer than 128?

It seems this page is abandoned.

Since it is core, this needs to be posted to Drupal, which I did

http://drupal.org/node/262265

Check it out :)

Changing issue settings.

This has been fixed already to 255 characters. Anything longer than that and you probably *shouldn't* be using such long paths. They're not good.