April 18, 2013
5:58 p.m.
On Apr 18, 2013, at 10:02 AM, Norbert Lindenberg <ietf@lindenbergsoftware.com> wrote:
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,
Presumably by "understand" you mean "have a file with the appropriate pathname"; I don't think software should "understand" the identifiers except by using them to construct pathnames of Olson-database files to load - it shouldn't "know" the pathname syntax or "know" what particular values of particular components of the pathname "mean".