[development] Pathauto scaleability - path column in node / user table

[Earl Miles]

Adrian Rossouw wrote:
> One of the things we discussed doing once 4.8 is open, around the time 
> of vancouver, was
> that in order to maintain an alias for each and every node, using the 
> path table for that,
> was just not going to scale.
>
> So, simply adding a 'path' column, which is in effect the preferred 
> alias for that object, and then using a
> node_link($node) function (or just l($node->path)), would allow us to 
> run modules like pathauto on
> very large production sites with thousands of nodes.
>
> This is a faily simple, albeit fairly large patch. Do we have any 
> volunteers / naysayers?
>
I have one request: When this goes in, ensure that modules can affect 
the generated URL. This is essential to being able to keep context on 
node views. Nodes often exist in more than one context (imagine the 
multi-parented book) but it's impossible to do the breadcrumbs right for 
it. However, if that context could be passed into the node, we could do 
some very cool stuff.