combining wrap_content on parent and fill_parent on child
In theory what you are describing should not work ("Because it the parent gets it's height from the childs and vice-versa".) However, we made it work in LinearLayout because it was a very common use case. I recently added similar support to FrameLayout (this feature should be part of Honeycomb.) What you are doing is therefore perfectly valid and will work just fine.
That doesn't make sense :(
Why don't you use android:singleLine="true" and some ellipsode?