[tz] Proposal to change Macquarie Island to be Australian territory

Norbert Lindenberg ietf at lindenbergsoftware.com
Thu Apr 18 17:02:51 UTC 2013


On Apr 18, 2013, at 6:52 , Paul Eggert wrote:

> If I had to do it over again I might put it in the Pacific, but
> given that it's in a geographically ambiguous area I'm inclined
> to leave it alone.  There is an advantage to not messing with the
> identifiers.

To put that more strongly: There are big disadvantages to messing with the identifiers. They are used in numerous protocols and APIs these days, and whenever an identifier is changed, it takes a long time (years in some cases) for software to get updated to understand the new identifier, and the updated software to be distributed. In the meantime, software and users encounter various failures as the new identifier is not understood by older software components still in use.

Norbert


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