Dear Ethan I think that the current rules are a good compromise between the needs of people who write and analyse data, and the needs of developers of analysis and other software. The former group of people would like CF to be modified fairly rapidly, when they are about to start producing data from a project, and they want that data to have proper metadata. As you will have seen from previous discussions, our discussions are too slow as it is sometimes. Hence we decided the rules so that changes could be made, but marked as provisional.
For provisional changes to become permanent depends on at least two applications supporting them. That requires some development effort to be invested. CF doesn't have staff resources of its own to commit to it. I think the most likely applications to make changes first are the cf-checker and libcf. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the changes so far agreed to be implemented in these or other applications. I fear that if we followed this approach: > 2) Don't add changes to the upcoming version of the specification > document "until at least two applications have successfully interpreted > the test data". development of CF would effectively be halted altogether. It would be impossible for writers of data to agree changes to the CF standard on a short enough timescale. Consequently they would bypass CF, and write and analyse data with their own metadata conventions, and the usefulness of CF in providing a common standard would be undermined. Applications don't have to keep entirely up to date, do they? I think the value of the Conventions attribute should be that it is easy to be clear about what conventions are being implemented in data and metadata. I agree about the test data. We should construct a file which contains some test data for the changes of CF 1.2. (The changes of CF 1.1 did not introduce any new attribute.) We'll need a place to deposit such files. As moderator of that ticket, I'll discuss it with Phil and Velimir. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
