On Tue, 08 Mar 2011 07:37:27 EST, Steven Bellovin said:
No. It was rejected because routers tended to melt down into quivering puddles of silicon from seeing many packets with IP options set -- a fast trip to the slow path. It also requires just as many changes to applications and DNS content, and about as large an addressing plan change as v6. There were more reasons, but they escape me at the moment.
Steve, you of all people should remember the other big reason why: pathalias tended to do Very Bad Things like violating the Principle of Least Surprise if there were two distinct nodes both called 'turtlevax' or whatever. That, and if you think BGP convergence sucks, imagine trying to run pathalias for a net the size of the current Internet. :)