I am a (currently unemployed) mouse. I worry when the cat announces changes that the cat says are of no interest to mice.
I worry especially when I can not clearly see a benifit to either cat or mice.
Look again. They may wish to make more than 99 updates a day to the zone(s) and the yyyymmddxx format is kind of restrictive in that regard.
Indeed. PIR and UltraDNS update the .org zone (and SOA serials) every couple of minutes, and propagate changes in an equivalently snappy fashion. In UltraDNS's case, the format appears to be yyyymmxxxx, or perhaps yyyyxxxxxx (hard to figure out what the scheme is this early in the year). I'm sure Verisign has gotten its share of "why the hell can't you guys do this" email since PIR started offering nice fast change turnarounds. I'm just hoping that the choice of a time_t as serial is not a harbinger of djbdns in the gtld servers... ---Rob