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

[Ian Abbott]

On 2013-04-18 18:02, Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
> 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.

That's what the backward file is for, so the old identifiers still work.

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk>        )=-
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