How and where should I override the character length of the description field for an exposed filter

Question

I've got an exposed filter with labels and descriptions in my Views. My design requires that the descriptions be displayed as tooltips on hover. In addition, I want this to be the general rule for all my exposed filters in all my views, so the fields that are exposed to visitors is different in each view (probably 10-12 different views with exposed filters). I've got all that working. However, I've run in to a problem with the character limit of the description field for the exposed filter and thus far, I've not been able to find a way around it. So my question is how and where should I override the character length of the description field for an exposed filter in my View?

I've found to possible places where this character limit is set. However, because it's in the core of the Views module I don't want to just change a setting only to have it overwritten the next time Views is updated.

Here are the two places I've found:

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/d7_chp/sites/all/modules/views/includes/admin.inc:
  313    $form['name'] = array(
  314      '#type' => 'machine_name',
  315:     '#maxlength' => 128,
  316      '#machine_name' => array(
  317        'exists' => 'views_get_view',

and

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/d7_chp/sites/all/modules/views/plugins/export_ui/views_ui.class.php:
  431      '#type' => 'machine_name',
  432      '#required' => TRUE,
  433:     '#maxlength' => 128,
  434      '#size' => 128,
  435      '#machine_name' => array(

I've looked at a variety of other options as well as adding additional fields to the content type but these are not options. Other than the fact that adding additional fields would be sloppy, the description field in the exposed filter perfectly fits what we need here and we were able to repurpose the tooltip styling and formatting we've created for other content in this piece so we believe that this is the best solution for our scenario and would prefer not to have to rebuild all the tooltip stuff we've already created for this instance.

Answer 1

After discussing it with Kevin in the comments above, I settled on a custom module to solve our problem. It's very simple and small module that includes the following:

function views_description_strlen_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {

if ($form_id == 'views_ui_config_item_form') {
    $form['options']['expose']['description']['#maxlength'] = 1000;
    }
}