Our testers have now reported as a bug that the drag and drop upload says (for certain users) 'Maximum upload size: unlimited' when in fact there is a limit at around 110MB due to server settings. (And when you try to upload a larger file, it fails in a reasonably horrible manner.)

This was discussed in MDL-33717.

I agree with them that this is a bug. My suggestion is that the 'maximum upload size' that is displayed on this page should apply to the activity you can actually do on this page (i.e. drag-drop upload) in which case it is definitely subject to the server limit. From the point of view of this page, I think it is clearly a bug and should be fixed.

Also it is much better for people to be told they are limited, and find they aren't, than for them to be told they aren't limited, and find they are.

However I am not sure how to resolve the problem around repositories that bypass the system upload limit. I think the solution is probably to display the upload size limit on each page of the file manager, i.e. as a 'status bar' type stripe across the bottom or something. The repository plugin would need to have a method that indicates its limit (possibly no limit) which could be used to construct the display. For example, a repository which copies files from a Windows share (I've written one of those, wonder if anyone wants it in core?) could indicate that it has no limit, whereas the upload repository can indicate that its limit is (whatever the php setting is). Moodle core code would then take the minimum of this value, and the current maxfilesize, and display the result.

Anyhow this sounds like quite a lot of work and I don't especially want to do it I thought I should at least raise the issue though as our testers found it and I didn't see it reported when I searched.