DDMAL/libmei — comment on commit 1f66074e11c167e26292f3046233147b7b7d580d
File:  line 0
By alastair:

This was intentional - the idea being that the xml importer would always set the id if it was in the xml file, but otherwise IDs were magically available when an element was created. Do you have an example where setting the ID is required? Somewhere where this could cause breakages is where the ID is already set on an element's startid or endid attribute.