Re: Use of "unassigned" in IANA registries

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Lars Eggert wrote:
> 
> On 2011-1-18, at 17:15, Eric Rosen wrote:
> > The only way to avoid collisions
> > due to "squatting" is to adopt a policy that all codepoint fields
> > be large enough so that a significant number of codepoints are
> > available for FCFS allocations.
> 
> That's certainly a suggestion we should follow for new registries, but
> unfortunately doesn't help us with existing ones.


A possibility for existing registries would be to allow for optimistic
reservation.  e.g. allow WG conensus to request a reservation of a code
point for registries that require standards action, which would cause
IANA to change a code point from "unassigned" to "reserved" (or "tentative")
for a certain amount of time.

It depends on the priorities: is it better to have a clean and strictly
sequential official assignments of code points (with collisions created
by those who do not want to wait), or is it better to prevent
collisions at the risk of somewhat scattered final assignments appearing
in the registry, and potential collisions with abandoned proposals when
the pool of available code points is getting exhausted.

-Martin