emergency-if — archive

[Rex Brooks]

My intention to reply in depth to Don's post has managed to get pushed farther and farther down my priority list, especially since Gary's proposed compromise, which I indicated I could live with, and today has been particularly difficult in that regard, so I must, in essence, throw in the towel with a couple of comments only. While I can live with Gary's compromise, I don't think it will stand the test of time, but we'll see about that. That's just my opinion. Having weighed the opposition, I decided that fighting it didn't make sense and was wasting precious time. I don't like it, but that's happened before and it hasn't proved fatal to me personally, and not as far as I know to anyone else, yet. The problem with the compromise is that no matter how well we caveat it, people will find a way to muck it up. Hopefully we can catch as much of that as possible in testing. Case in point, when we initially finished CAP one of our three letter agencies decided to use it and promptly caused its network to crash because so many of their systems went out over the web at the same time to get the schema and validate it. I would never have guessed that folks with that much experience and intelligence would not actually cache the schema locally, but they didn't. Stuff happens. I will ask that we carefully and accurately document our requirements and our caveats. I think it would be especially helpful if we carefully delineate where users can safely use