Could you provide a sample description that can be set as a project description and that demonstrates the problem?

This issue is about build descriptions only. I have not tested setting project descriptions. Build descriptions are visible on project page (Build History table) and naturally on the build page itself. Displaying build descriptions in Build History table (project page) seems to be the problem here.

Here is a sample shell script that sets the build description during the build.

jcli="ssh -p <port> <jenkins host>"

function get_first_link()
{
  local text="first"
  local url="http://xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxxx/xxxxx/xxxxx/xxxxx/xxxxx?zzz=yyy&aaa=bbb&ccc=ddd&eee=123"
  # this does not work:
  echo "[$text]($url)"
  # this works:
  # echo "<a\ href=\"$url\">$text</a>"
}

function get_second_link()
{
  <this is similar to get_first_link>
}

first=$( get_first_link )
second=$( get_second_link )
desc="$first\ $second"
$jcli set-build-description "$JOB_NAME" "$BUILD_NUMBER" "$desc"

Thanks, now it's clear that it's about the automatic truncating of build descriptions in the history widget.

hudson/widgets/HistoryWidget/entry.jelly calls app.markupFormatter.translate(build.truncatedDescription) and Run.getTruncatedDescription operates on the raw text when determining where to truncate, so the markup formatter receives an incomplete format string.

Should probably add MarkupFormatter.translateAndTruncate(String markup, Writer output, int maxLength) for this case.

We are experiencing a similar problem in our production environment, with a slightly different variation. It appears as though the truncation logic in the history widget is taking into account the build ID and time stamp strings in it's calculations for truncation. As a result when our build numbers went from being 5 digits to 6 digits in certain jobs, information that used to be present in the history widget (ie: from the build description) is now being truncated.

What's even stranger is that even though presumably the summary content only grows by 1 or 2 characters (ie: 1 extra digit in the build number, and perhap 1 extra carriage return character to put to the timestamp on the following line) the build description seems to have an entire line of output being truncated which had previously been present.

First off, I wouldn't have expected the timestamp to be wrapped in this case at all since there is plenty of white space surrounding the text currently. So that was odd. Secondly, it seemed odd that the build description would get truncated differently dependent upon how the summary / header information is displayed in the history. I would have expected the descriptive text to be truncated consistently regardless of the header info.

On a related note, is there any way to customize the truncation length for the history widget?

Fixed by https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/4209 and should be released in 2.198 next week. History widget no longer truncates build description.