Example.com Has Changed

An anonymous reader writes "The familiar example.com domain, reserved for private testing, has been updated. Visiting the domain in a web browser no longer displays any content; instead, visitors are redirected to an explanatory page on IANA's website at iana.org/domains/example/. Other example domains such as example.net are also affected. Is this a bad change? Will the redirect cause problems for anybody?"

Re:you might have bigger problem

[Bogtha]

Then that was a bug in Darcs. example.com was never a guarantee that any particular URL served from that domain would fail. Also note that they said that the URL would fail. That is not the same as the domain not existing. example.com has existed for years and years. Presumably they were appending a random string to http://example.com/ and hoping to get a 404. If the test suite was expecting example.com to not exist, then it never would have worked in the first place.

Re:you might have bigger problem

[klapaucjusz]

If you need a dns entry that doesn't exist, pick one that you are authoritative for and make sure it doesn't exist.

That's exactly what they did:

-not darcs get http://example.com/foo [example.com]
+not darcs get http://darcs.net/nonexistent [darcs.net]