Does network byte order matter for proprietary protocols?

So I've got a custom binary protocol that runs over UDP.

My source is a little-endian embedded device, with the transmit basically being send(packed struct) . My destination devices are overwhelmingly going to be little endian PCs.

I got a request to change to network byte order. My instant response was "not a chance". I'm not seeing any point in going and flipping every one of my 100+ fields, a mix of 2 to 8 byte integers, along with floats and doubles, and then making 开发者_如何学运维most all of my users turn right around and flip them all back, and dealing with all the minor coding errors on both sides.

Am I missing something? Does network byte order really matter today? Did it really ever matter? Specifying what the byte order is obviously critically important, but beyond that, who really cares?

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There is no need to switch to network byte order whatever the other machines on the network use - you are perfectly free to declare that the XPav protocol uses little-endian values.

Of course when it becomes an international standard that might be a bit of a problem - but that's in the future.