jsh@usenix.org (06/30/90)
From: <jsh@usenix.org> An Update on UNIX*-Related Standards Activities June, 1990 USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee Jeffrey S. Haemer, jsh@ico.isc.com, Report Editor Recent Standards Activities This editorial is an overview of some of the spring-quarter standards activities covered by the USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee. A companion article provides a general overview of the committee itself. In this article, I've emphasized non-technical issues, which are unlikely to appear in official minutes and mailings of the standards committees. Previously published articles give more detailed, more technical views on most of these groups' activities. If my comments move you to read one of those earlier reports that you wouldn't have read otherwise, I've served my purpose. Of course, on reading that report you may discover the watchdog's opinion differs completely from mine. SEC: Standard/Sponsor Executive Committee The biggest hullabaloo in the POSIX world this quarter came out of the SEC, the group that approves creation of new committees. At the April meeting, in a move to slow the uncontrolled proliferation of POSIX standards, the institutional representatives (IRs) (one each from Usenix, UniForum, X/Open, OSF, and UI) recommended two changes in the Project Authorization Request (PAR) approval process: (1) firm criteria for PAR approval and group persistence and (2) a PAR-approval group that had no working-group chairs or co-chairs. Dale Harris, of IBM Austin, presented the proposal and immediately took a lot of heat from the attendees, most of whom are working-group chairs and co- chairs (Dale isn't an IR, but shared the concerns that motivated the recommendations and asked to make the presentation.) The chair, Jim Isaak, created an ad-hoc committee to talk over the proposal in a less emotional atmosphere. Consensus when the committee met was that the problem of proliferating PARs was real, and the only question was how to fix it. The group put together a formal set of criteria for PAR approval (which John Quarterman has posted to comp.std.unix), which seems to have satisfied everyone on the SEC, and passed without issue. The criteria seem to have teeth: at least one of the Project Authorization Requests presented later (1201.3, UIMS) __________ * UNIX is a Registered Trademark of UNIX System Laboratories in the United States and other countries. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 2 - flunked the criteria and was rejected. Two others (1201.1 and 1201.4 toolkits and Xlib) were deferred. I suspect (though doubt that any would admit it) that the proposals would have been submitted and passed in the absence of the criteria. In another related up-note, Tim Baker and Jim Isaak drafted a letter to one group (1224, X.400 API), warning them that they must either prove they're working or dissolve. The second of the two suggestions, the creation of a PAR-approval subcommittee, sank quietly. The issue will stay submerged so long as it looks like the SEC is actually using the approved criteria to fix the problem. [ Actually, this may not be true. Watch for developments at the next meeting, in Danvers, MA in mid-July. -jsq] Shane McCarron's column in the July Unix Review covers this area in more detail. 1003.0: POSIX Guide Those of you who have read my last two columns will know that I've taken the position that dot zero is valuable, even if it doesn't get a lot of measurable work done. This time, I have to say it looks like it's also making measurable progress, and may go to mock ballot by its target of fourth quarter of this year. To me, the most interesting dot-zero-related items this quarter are the growing prominence of profiles, and the mention of dot zero's work in the PAR-approval- criteria passed by the SEC. Al Hankinson, the chair, tells me that he thinks dot zero's biggest contribution has been popularizing profiles -- basically, application-area-specific lists of pointers to other standards. This organizing principle has been adopted not only by the SEC (several of the POSIX groups are writing profiles), but by NIST (Al's from NIST) and ISO. I suspect a lot of other important organizations will fall in line here. Nestled among the other criteria for PAR approval, is a requirement that PAR proposers write a sample description of their group for the POSIX guide. Someone questioned why proposers should have to do dot zero's job for them. The explanation comes in two pieces. First, dot zero doesn't have the resources to be an expert on everything, it has its hands full just trying to create an overall architecture. Second, the proposers aren't supplying what will ultimately go into the POSIX guide, they're supplying a sample. The act of drafting that sample will force each proposer to think hard about where the new group would fit in the grand scheme, right from the start. This should help insure that the guide's architecture really does reflect the rest of the POSIX effort, and will increase the interest of the other groups in the details of the guide. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 3 - 1003.1: System services interface Dot one, the only group that has completed a standard, is in the throes of completing a second. Not only has the IEEE updated the existing standard -- the new version will be IEEE 1003.1-1990 -- ISO appears on the verge of approving the new version as IS 9945-1. The major sticking points currently seem limited to things like format and layout -- important in the bureaucratic world of international standards, but inconsequential to the average user. Speaking of layout, one wonders whether the new edition and ISO versions will retain the yellow-green cover that has given the current document its common name -- the ugly green book. (I've thought about soaking mine in Aqua Velva so it can smell like Green Chartreuse, too.) The interesting issues in the group are raised by the dot-one-b work, which adds new functionality. (Read Paul Rabin's snitch report for the gory details.) The thorniest problem is the messaging work. Messaging, here, means a mechanism for access to external text and is unrelated to msgget(), msgop(), msgctl(), or any other message-passing schemes. The problem being addressed is how to move all printable strings out of our programs and into external ``message'' files so that we can change program output from, say, English to German by changing an environmental variable. Other dot-one-b topics, like symbolic links, are interesting, but less pervasive. This one will change the way you write any commercial product that outputs text -- anything that has printf() statements. The group is in a quandary. X/Open has a scheme that has gotten a little use. We're not talking three or four years of shake-out, here, but enough use to lay a claim to the ``existing practice'' label. On the other hand, it isn't a very pleasant scheme, and you'd have no problem coming up with candidate alternatives. The UniForum Internationalization Technical Committee presented one at the April meeting. It's rumored that X/Open itself may replace its current scheme with another. So, what to do? Changing to a new scheme ignores existing internationalized applications and codifies an untried approach. Blessing the current X/Open scheme freezes evolution at this early stage and kills any motivation to develop an easy-to-use alternative. Not providing any standard makes internationalized applications (in a couple of years this will mean any non-throw-away program) non-portable, and requires that we continue to have to make heavy source-code modifications on every port -- just what POSIX is supposed to help us get around. To help you think about the problem, here's the way you'll have to write the "hello, world" koan using the X/OPEN interfaces: June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 4 - #include <stdio.h> #include <nl_types.h> #include <locale.h> main() { nl_catd catd; (void)setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); catd = catopen("hello", 0); /* error checking omitted for brevity */ printf(catgets(catd, 1, 1,"hello, world\n")); } and using the alternative, proposed UniForum interfaces: #include <stdio.h> #include <locale.h> main() { (void)setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); (void)textdomain("hello"); printf(gettext("hello, world\n")); } I suppose if I had my druthers, I'd like to see a standard interface that goes even farther than the UniForum proposal: one that adds a default message catalogue/group (perhaps based on the name of the program) and a standard, printf-family messaging function to hide the explicit gettext() call, so the program could look like this: #include <stdio.h> #include <locale.h> #define printf printmsg main() { (void)setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); /* inescapable, required by ANSI C */ printf("hello, world\n"); } but that would still be untested innovation. The weather conditions in Colorado have made this a bonus year for moths. Every morning, our bathroom has about forty moths in it. Stuck in our house, wanting desperately to get out, they fly toward the only light that they can see and beat themselves to death on the bathroom window. I don't know what to tell them, either. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 5 - 1003.2: Shell and utilities Someone surprised me at the April meeting by asserting that 1003.2 might be an important next target for the FORTRAN binding group. (``What does that mean?'' I asked stupidly. ``A standard for a FORTRAN-shell?'') Perhaps you, like I, just think of dot two as language-independent utilities. Yes and no. First, 1003.2 has over a dozen function calls (e.g., getopt()). I believe that most of these should be moved into 1003.1. System() and popen(), which assume a shell, might be exceptions, but having sections of standards documents point at things outside their scope is not without precedent. Section 8 of P1003.1-1988 is a section of C- language extensions, and P1003.5 will depend on the Ada standard. Why shouldn't an optional section of dot one depend on dot two? Perhaps ISO, already committed to re-grouping and re-numbering the standards, will fix this. Perhaps not. In the meantime, there are functions in dot two that need FORTRAN and Ada bindings. Second, the current dot two standard specifies a C compiler. Dot nine has already helped dot two name the FORTRAN compiler, and may want to help dot two add a FORTRAN equivalent of lint (which I've heard called ``flint''). Dot five may want to provide analogous sorts of help (though Ada compilers probably already subsume much of lint's functionality). Third, more subtle issues arise in providing a portable utilities environment for programmers in other languages. Numerical libraries, like IMSL, are often kept as single, large source files with hundreds, or even thousands, of routines in a single .f file that compiles into a single .o file. Traditional FORTRAN environments provide tools that allow updating or extraction of single subroutines or functions from such objects, analogous to the way ar can add or replace single objects in libraries. Dot nine may want to provide such a facility in a FORTRAN binding to dot two. Anyway, back to the working group. They're preparing to go to ballot on the UPE (1003.2a, User Portability Extensions). The mock ballot had pretty minimal return, with only ten balloters providing approximately 500 objections. Ten isn't very many, but mock ballot for dot two classic only had twenty-three. It seems that people won't vote until they're forced to. The collection of utilities in 1003.2a is fairly reasonable, with only a few diversions from historic practice. A big exception is ps(1), where historic practice is so heterogeneous that a complete redesign is possible. Unfortunately, no strong logical thread links the 1003.2a commands together, so read the ballot with an eye toward commands that should be added or discarded. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 6 - A few utilities have already disappeared since the last draft. Pshar, an implementation of shar with a lot of bells and whistles, is gone. Compress/uncompress poses an interesting problem. Though the utility is based on clear-cut existing practice, the existing implementation uses an algorithm that is copyrighted. Unless the author chooses to give the algorithm away (as Ritchie dedicated his set-uid patent to public use), the committee is faced with a hard choice: - They can specify only the user interface. But the purpose of these utilities is to ease the cost of file interchange. What good are they without a standard data-interchange format? - They can invent a new algorithm. Does it make sense to use something that isn't field-tested or consistent with the versions already out there? (One assumes that the existing version has real advantages, otherwise, why would so many people use a copyrighted version?) Expect both the first real ballot of 1003.2a and recirculation of 1003.2 around July. Note that the recirculation will only let you object to items changed since the last draft, for all the usual bad reasons. 1003.3: Test methods The first part of dot three's work is coming to real closure. The last ballot failed, but my guess is that one will pass soon, perhaps as soon as the end of the year, and we will have a standard for testing conformance to IEEE 1003.1-1988. That isn't to say that all is rosy in dot-one testing. NIST's POSIX Conformance Test Suite (PCTS) still has plenty of problems: misinterpretations of dot one, simple timing test problems that cause tests to run well on 3b2's, but produce bad results on a 30 mips machine and even real bugs (attempts to read from a tty without first opening it). POSIX dot one is far more complex than anything for which standard test suites have been developed to date. The PCTS, with around 2600 tests and 150,000 lines of code, just reflects that complexity. An update will be sent to the National Technical Information Service (NTIS -- also part of the Department Commerce, but not to be confused with NIST) around the end of September which fixes all known problems but, with a suite this large, others are likely to surface later. By the way, NIST's dot one suite is a driver based on the System V Verification Suite (SVVS), plus individual tests developed at NIST. Work has begun on a suite of tests for 1003.2, based, for convenience, on a suite done originally for IBM by Mindcraft. It isn't clear how quickly this work will go. (For example, the suite can't gel until dot two does.) For the dot one work, NIST made good use of Research June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 7 - Associates -- people whose services were donated by their corporations during the test suite development. Corporations gain an opportunity to collaborate with NIST and inside knowledge of the test suite. I suspect Roger Martin may now be seeking Research Associates for dot two test suite development. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, want to spend some time working in the Washington, D.C. area, and think your company would sponsor you, his email address is rmartin@swe.ncsl.nist.gov. By the way, there are a variety of organizational and numbering changes happening in dot three. See Doris Lebovits's snitch report for details. The Steering Committee on Conformance Testing (SCCT) is the group to watch. Though they've evolved out of the dot three effort, they operate at the TCOS level, and are about to change the way POSIX standards look. In response to the ever-increasing burden placed on the testing committee, the SCCT is going to recommend that groups producing new standards include in those standards a list of test assertions to be used in testing them. Groups that are almost done, like 1003.2, will be grandfathered in. But what should be done with a group like dot four -- not far enough along that it has something likely to pass soon, but far enough to make the addition of major components to its ballot a real problem. Should this case be treated like language independence? If so, perhaps dot four will also be first in providing test assertions. 1003.4: Real-time extensions The base dot-four document has gone to ballot, and the ensuing process looks like it may be pretty bloody. Fifty-seven percent of the group voted against the current version. (One member speculated privately that this meant forty-three percent of the balloting group didn't read it.) Twenty-two percent of the group (nearly half of those voting against) subscribed to all or part of a common reference ballot, which would require that entire chapters of the document be completely reworked, replaced, or discarded. Subscribers to this common reference ballot included employees of Unix International and the Open Software Foundation, of Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of California at Berkeley, and of Sun Microsystems and Hewlett- Packard. (USENIX did not ballot similarly, but only because of lack of time.) Some of these organizations have never before agreed on the day of the week, let alone the semantics of system calls. But then, isn't bringing the industry together one goal of POSIX? Still, the document has not been returned to the working group by the technical editors, so we can assume they feel hopeful about resolving all the objections. Some of this hope may come from the miracle of formality. I've heard that over half of the common reference ballot could be declared non-responsive, which means that there's no June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 8 - obligation to address over half the concerns. The threads work appears to enjoy a more positive consensus. At least two interesting alternatives to the current proposal surfaced at the April meeting, but following a lot of discussion, the existing proposal stood largely unchanged. I predict that the threads work which will go to ballot after the base, dot four document, will be approved before it. John Gertwagen, dot four snitch and chair of UniForum's real-time technical committee, has bet me a beer that I'm wrong. 1003.5: Ada bindings and 1003.9: FORTRAN-77 bindings These groups are coming to the same place at the same time. Both are going to ballot and seem likely to pass quickly. In each case, the major focus is shifting from technical issues to the standards process and its rules: forming balloting groups, relations with ISO, future directions, and so on. Here's your chance to do a good deed without much work. Stop reading, call someone you know who would be interested in these standards, and give them the name of someone on the committee who can put them into the balloting group. (If nothing else, point them at our snitches for this quarter: Jayne Baker cgb@d74sun.mitre.org, for dot five, and Michael Hannah mjhanna@sandia.gov, for dot nine.) They'll get both a chance to see the standard that's about to land on top of their work and a chance to object to anything that's slipped into the standard that doesn't make sense. The more the merrier on this one, and they don't have to go to any committee meetings. I've already called a couple of friends of mine at FORTRAN-oriented companies; both were pleased to hear about 1003.9, and eager to read and comment on the proposed standard. Next up for both groups, after these standards pass, is negotiating the IEEE standard through the shoals of ISO, both getting and staying in sync with the various versions and updates of the base standard (1003.1a, 1003.1b, and 9945-1), and language bindings to other standards, like 1003.2 and 1003.4. (See my earlier discussion of dot two.) Notice that they also have the burden of tracking their own language standards. At least in the case of 1003.9, this probably means eventually having to think about a binding to X3J3 (Fortran 90). 1003.6: Security This group has filled the long-vacant post of technical editor, and, so, is finally back in the standards business. In any organization whose ultimate product is to be a document, the technical editor is a key person. [We pause here to allow readers to make some obligatory cheap shot about editors.] This is certainly the case in the POSIX groups, where the technical editors sometimes actually write large fractions of the final document, albeit under the direction of the June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 9 - working group. I'm about to post the dot six snitch report, and don't want to give any of it away, but will note that it's strongly opinionated and challenges readers to find any non-DoD use for Mandatory Access Control, one of the half-dozen areas that they're standardizing. 1003.7: System administration This group has to solve two problems at different levels at the same time. On the one hand, it's creating an object-oriented definition of system administration. This high-level approach encapsulates the detailed implementation of objects interesting to the system administrator (user, file system, etc.), so that everyone can see them in the same way on a heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, the protocol for sending messages to these objects must be specified in detail. If it isn't, manufacturers won't be able to create interoperable systems. The group as a whole continues to get complaints about its doing research-by-committee. It's not even pretending to standardize existing practice. I have mixed feelings about this, but am unreservedly nervous that some of the solutions being contemplated aren't even UNIX-like. For example, the group has tentatively proposed the unusual syntax object action. Command names will be names of objects, and the things to be done to them will be arguments. This bothers me (and others) for two reasons. First, this confuses syntax with semantics. You can have the message name first and still be object-oriented; look at C++. Second, it reverses the traditional, UNIX verb-noun arrangement: mount filesystem becomes filesystem mount. This flies in the face of the few existing practices everyone agrees on. I worry that these problems, and the resulting inconsistencies between system administration commands and other utilities, will confuse users. I have a recurring nightmare of a long line of new employees outside my door, all come to complain that I've forgotten to mark one of my device objects, /dev/null, executable. With no existing practice to provide a reality-check, the group faces an uphill struggle. If you're an object-oriented maven with a yen to do something useful, take a look at what this group is doing, then implement some of it and see if it makes sense. Look at it this way: by the time the standard becomes reality, you'll have a product, ready to ship. 1003.10: Supercomputing This group is working on things many of us us old-timers thought we had seen the last of: batch processing and checkpointing. The supercomputing community, condemned forever to live on the edge of what computers can accomplish, is forced into the same approaches we used back when computer cycles were harder to come by than programmer cycles, and machines were less reliable than software. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 10 - Supercomputers run programs that can't be run on less powerful computers because of their massive resource requirements (cpu/memory/io). They need batch processing and checkpointing because many of them are so resource-intensive that they even run for a long time on supercomputers. Nevertheless, the supercomputing community is not the only group that would benefit from standardization in these areas. (See, for example, my comments on dot fourteen.) Even people who have (or wish to have) long-running jobs on workstations, share some of the same needs for batch processing and checkpointing. Karen Sheaffer, the chair of dot ten, had no trouble quickly recasting the group's proposal for a batch PAR into a proposal that passed the SEC's PAR-approval criteria. The group is modeling a batch proposal after existing practice, and things seem to be going smoothly. Checkpointing, on the other hand, isn't faring as well. People who program supercomputers need to have a way to snapshot jobs in a way that lets them restart the jobs at that point later. Think, for example, of a job that needs to run for longer than a machine's mean- time-to-failure. Or a job that runs for just a little longer than your grant money lasts. There are existing, proprietary schemes in the supercomputing world, but none that's portable. The consensus is that a portable mechanism would be useful and that support for checkpointing should be added to the dot one standard. The group brought a proposal to dot one b, but it was rejected for reasons detailed in Paul Rabin's dot one report. Indeed, the last I heard, dot-one folks were suggesting that dot ten propose interfaces that would be called from within the program to be checkpointed. While this may seem to the dot-one folks like the most practical approach, it seems to me to be searching under the lamp-post for your keys because that's where the light's brightest. Users need to be able to point to a job that's run longer than anticipated and say, ``Checkpoint this, please.'' Requiring source-code modification to accomplish this is not only unrealistic, it's un-UNIX-like. (A helpful person looking over my shoulder has just pointed out that the lawyers have declared ``UNIX'' an adjective, and I should say something like ``un-UNIX-system-like'' instead. He is, of course, correct.) Whatever the interface is, it simply must provide a way to let a user point at another process and say, ``Snapshot it,'' just as we can stop a running job with job control. 1003.12: Protocol-independent interfaces This group is still working on two separate interfaces to the network: Simple Network Interface (SNI) and Detailed Network Interface (DNI). The January meeting raised the possibility that the group would coalesce these into a single scheme, but that scheme seems not to have materialized. DNI will provide a familiar socket- or XTI/TLI-like interface to networks, while SNI will provide a simpler, stdio-like June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 11 - interface for programs that don't need the level of control that DNI will provide. The challenge of SNI is to make something that's simple but not so crippled that it's useless. The challenge of DNI is to negotiate the fine line between the two competing, existing practices. The group has already decided not to use either sockets or XTI, and is looking at requirements for the replacement. Our snitch, Andy Nicholson, challenged readers to find a reason not to make DNI endpoints POSIX file descriptors, but has seen no takers. 1003.14: Multiprocessing The multiprocessing group, which had been meeting as sort of an ad-hoc spin-off of the real-time group, was given PAR approval at the April meeting as 1003.16 but quickly renamed 1003.14 for administrative reasons. They're currently going through the standard set of jobs that new groups have to accomplish, including figuring out what tasks need to be accomplished, whom to delegate them to, and how to attract enough working-group members to get everything done. If you want to get in on the ground floor of the multiprocessing standard, come to Danvers and volunteer to do something. One thing that needs to be done is liaison work with other committees, many of which are attacking problems that bear on multiprocessors as well. One example is dot ten's checkpointing work, which I talked about earlier, Checkpointing is both of direct interest to dot fourteen, and is analogous to several other problems the group would like to address. (A side-effect of the PAR proliferation problem mentioned earlier is that inter-group coordination efforts go up as the square of the number of groups.) 1201: Windows, sort of Okay, as a review, we went into the Utah meeting with one official group, 1201, and four unofficial groups preparing PARs: 1. 1201.1: Application toolkit 2. 1201.2: Recommended Practice for Driveability/User Portability 3. 1201.3: User Interface Management Systems 4. 1201.4: Xlib By the end of the week, one PAR had been shot down (1201.3), one approved (1201.2), and two remained unsubmitted. The 1201.4 par was deferred because the X consortium says Xlib is about to change enough that we don't want to standardize the existing version. I'll ask, ``If it's still changing this fast, do we want to even standardize on the next version?'' The 1201.1 PAR was deferred because the group hasn't agreed on what it wants to do. At the June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 12 - beginning of the week, the two major camps (OSF/Motif and OPEN LOOK)* had agreed to try to merge the two interfaces. By mid-week, they wouldn't even sit at the same table. That they'd struck off in an alternative, compromise direction by the end of the week speaks extremely highly of all involved. What the group's looking at now is a toolkit at the level of XVT**: a layer over all of the current, competing technologies that would provide portability without invalidating any existing applications. This seems like just the right approach. (I have to say this because I suggested it in an editorial about six months ago.) The 1201.3 PAR was rejected. Actually, 1201 as a whole voted not to submit it, but the people working on it felt strongly enough that they submitted it anyway. The SEC's consensus was that the field wasn't mature enough to warrant even a recommended practice, but the work should continue, perhaps as a UniForum Technical Committee. The study group countered that it was important to set a standard before there were competing technologies, and that none of the attendees sponsoring companies would be willing to foot the bill for their work within anything but a standards body. The arguments weren't persuasive. The 1201.2 PAR, in contrast, sailed through. What's interesting about this work is that it won't be an API standard. A fair fraction of the committee members are human-factors people, and the person presenting the PAR convinced the SEC that there is now enough consensus in this area that a standard is appropriate. I'm willing to believe this, but I think that stretching the net of the IEEE's Technical Committee on Operating Systems so wide that it takes in a human-factors standard for windowing systems is overreaching. X3 There are other ANSI-accredited standards-sponsoring bodies in the U.S. besides the IEEE. The best known in our field is the Computer Business Equipment Manufacturers' Association (CBEMA), which sponsors the X3 efforts, recently including X3J11, the ANSI-C standards committee. X3J11's job has wound down; Doug Gwyn tells me that there's so little happening of general interest that it isn't worth a report. Still, there's plenty going on in the X3 world. One example is X3B11, which is developing a standard for file systems on optical disks. Though this seems specialized, Andrew Hume suggests in his __________ * OSF/Motif is a Registered Trademark of the Open Software Foundation. OPEN LOOK is a Registered Trademark of AT&T. ** XVT is a trademark of XVT Software Inc. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 13 - report that this work may eventually evolve into a standards effort for file systems on any read-write mass storage device. See the dot- four common reference ballot for the kind of feelings new file-system standards bring out. I encourage anyone out there on an X3 committee who thinks the committee could use more user exposure and input to file a report. For example, Doug Gwyn suggests that there is enough activity in the C++ standards world to merit a look. If anyone out there wants to volunteer a report, I'd love to see it. June, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 66
barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin) (07/01/90)
Moderator!: Delete most of these lines (begin): Return-Path: <news@Think.COM> Sender: uunet!Think.COM!news Submitted-From: uunet!Think.COM!barmar (Barry Margolin) Moderator!: Delete most of these lines (end). From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin) In article <387@usenix.ORG> From: <jsh@usenix.org> > The problem being addressed is how to move all printable >strings out of our programs and into external ``message'' files so >that we can change program output from, say, English to German by >changing an environmental variable. Both examples you supplied were simply ways to look up strings to output in a database keyed on locale and an internal program string; they differ only in minor ways. Does either proposal address any of the *hard* issues? For instance, different languages have different pluralization rules; how do you internationalize a program that automatically pluralizes when necessary (I hate programs that say things like "1 files deleted")? Or what about differing word order; how would you internationalize printf("the %s %s", adjective, noun); so that it would look right in a language where adjectives follow nouns? -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 77
jason@cnd.hp.com (Jason Zions) (07/02/90)
From: Jason Zions <jason@cnd.hp.com> Regarding the Snitch Editor's fine report, in the section discussing 1003.12 comes the following sentence: > Our snitch, Andy Nicholson, challenged readers to find a reason not to > make DNI endpoints POSIX file descriptors, but has seen no takers. How about because it constrains implementations to make DNI kernel-resident? How about because the semantics of operations permitted on POSIX file descriptors are a poor match for many transport providers? Read()/write() are stream operations; only TCP is a stream transport provider. OSI TP0/2/4 maps much more closely to stdio and fgets()/fputs() in that it is record-oriented. What does it mean to seek() on a network endpoint? A significant branch of the UNIX(tm)-system and POSIX research community believes "All the world's a file"; the Research Unix V.8 and Plan 9 folks are among the leaders here. I feel only slightly squeemish about accusing them of having only a hammer in their toolbelt; of *course* everything looks like a nail! I think it would probably be acceptable to have a DNI function which accepted a DNI endpoint as argument and attempted to return a real file descriptor. This function would check to see that the underlying transport provider could present reasonable semantics through a POSIX file descriptor, and would also check that the implementation supported access to that transport provider through a kernel interface. Jason Zions * UNIX is a trademark of AT&T in the US and other countries. ** Obstreperous iconoclast is a behavioral trademark of Jason Zions in the US and other countries. Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 85
guy@auspex.uucp (Guy Harris) (07/03/90)
From: guy@auspex.uucp (Guy Harris) >Both examples you supplied were simply ways to look up strings to output in >a database keyed on locale and an internal program string; they differ only >in minor ways. Does either proposal address any of the *hard* issues? For >instance, different languages have different pluralization rules; how do >you internationalize a program that automatically pluralizes when necessary >(I hate programs that say things like "1 files deleted")? Or what about >differing word order; how would you internationalize > > printf("the %s %s", adjective, noun); > >so that it would look right in a language where adjectives follow nouns? The latter can addressed by a scheme like the X/Open NLS scheme, in which "printf" arguments can be decorated by specifiers that say which of the N arguments to "*printf" following the format string should be used; the "the %s %s" would have to replace "%s %s" with "%$2s %$1s". HOWEVER: This does *NOT* do anything about the pluralization rules. It *also* does nothing about the fact that the correct translation of "the" could depend on the noun in question; i.e., is it "la" or "le" in French? I think that, for reasons such as these, the only solution to the problem of trying to find a Magic Bullet so that you can trivially internationalize the message-printing code of applications by throwing a simple-minded wrapper around "printf" (whether the #define approach, or replacing the format string with "getmsg(the format string)", or whatever) is to have software that is sufficiently knowledgable about *all* human languages supported that it knows the gender of all nouns you'll use in your messages, and knows the right articles for those genders (for all cases the language has), and knows how to pluralize arbitrary words. In fact, I'm not even sure *that's* sufficient; I only know about some Indo-European languages, and other languages may throw in problems I haven't even considered. In other words, I don't think there's a solution to the problem of "oh dear, how are we going to get all our applications modified to put out grammatically-correct messages in different languages without having to examine all the code that generates messages and possibly rewrite some of that code" other than teaching the system a fair bit about lots of human languages. I don't think you can even come up with an approach that's close enough to a solution to be interesting. I'm afraid you're just going to have to fall back on things such as: having "1 frob" and "%d frobs" be *two* separate messages in the message catalog; having "the chair" and "the table" either be two separate messages, rather than having "the %s" and foreign-language versions of same, or having the message be "%s %s" and have the database tie the noun and the article together (watch out for Russian, though, they don't *use* articles...); etc.. Yeah, this may mean human intervention, rather than being able to internationalize your messages by running just running a few programs over the code; nobody ever said that life was fair. Might as well bite the bullet.... Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 86
guy@auspex.uucp (Guy Harris) (07/04/90)
From: guy@auspex.uucp (Guy Harris) >How about because the semantics of operations permitted on POSIX file >descriptors are a poor match for many transport providers? Read()/write() >are stream operations; only TCP is a stream transport provider. OSI TP0/2/4 >maps much more closely to stdio and fgets()/fputs() in that it is >record-oriented. Standard I/O, and "fgets()"/"fputs()" in particular, are record-oriented? News to me; I thought standard I/O offered byte streams, and "fgets()" read stuff from that stream until it hit a newline or EOF, and "fputs" put bytes from a string out onto that stream. For that matter, raw magtapes are also record oriented, and "read()" and "write()" work fine on them. I don't see the problem with TPn; a single "write()" could either be turned into one packet, or broken up arbitrarily into N packets if there's a maximum packet size. If you *want* to have a correspondence between "send it" calls and records, I see no problem with providing additional calls to do that, but I also don't see any problem with hiding record boundaries, if necessary, from applications that *want* to just send byte streams over TPn. >What does it mean to seek() on a network endpoint? What does it mean to "seek()" on a tty? Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 96
peter@ficc.ferranti.com (peter da silva) (07/04/90)
From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (peter da silva) In article <770@longway.TIC.COM> From: jason@cnd.hp.com (Jason Zions) > Read()/write() are stream operations; only TCP is a stream transport > provider. OSI TP0/2/4 maps much more closely to stdio and fgets()/fputs() > in that it is record-oriented. The same is true of a UNIX tty device with canonical processing. So? > What does it mean to seek() on a network endpoint? What does it mean to seek() on a pipe? -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.ferranti.com> Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 94
gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) (07/04/90)
From: Doug Gwyn <gwyn@smoke.brl.mil> >From: guy@auspex.uucp (Guy Harris) >In other words, I don't think there's a solution to the problem of "oh >dear, how are we going to get all our applications modified to put out >grammatically-correct messages in different languages without having to >examine all the code that generates messages and possibly rewrite some >of that code" other than teaching the system a fair bit about lots of >human languages. Might as well leave out the clause "other than ...". Perhaps we could persuade those who think there should be a simple rule for writing just one message text when programming for a variety of cultures to use Esperanto for their messages. At least that way they will be understood just as readily by all customers.. :-) Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 92
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (07/04/90)
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) >From: Jason Zions <jason@cnd.hp.com> >How about because it constrains implementations to make DNI >kernel-resident? Nonsense. Nothing in 1003.n constrains implementations to make anything kernel-resident. Things like read() are functions, which may or may not reflect the primitives of the underlying kernel. They are merely required to communicate -- somehow -- with something that performs the required services. Why have two different kinds of endpoints for I/O? We already have one which is general enough to encompass almost every kind of I/O under the sun. >How about because the semantics of operations permitted on POSIX file >descriptors are a poor match for many transport providers? Read()/write() >are stream operations; only TCP is a stream transport provider. OSI TP0/2/4 >maps much more closely to stdio and fgets()/fputs() in that it is >record-oriented. What does it mean to seek() on a network endpoint? Read()/write() are stream operations that work perfectly well as record operations too. As witness Unix ttys, which are record-oriented devices on input, and Unix magtapes, which are record-oriented both ways. As for what it means to seek on a network endpoint, exactly the same as it means to seek on a tty: probably nothing. But why invent new mechanisms for I/O when the old ones will do perfectly well? "Don't fix it if it ain't broken." Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 93
karl@IMA.IMA.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) (07/05/90)
From: karl@IMA.IMA.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) In article <778@longway.TIC.COM> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >As for what it means to seek on a network endpoint, exactly the same as it >means to seek on a tty: probably nothing. Better yet, it should return an error (like an attempt to seek on a pipe). I don't think there's any excuse for tty seek having been defined as a no-op in the first place; it's too bad POSIX didn't require this to be fixed. (Is there any reliable way to tell whether a given fd is seekable?) Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 98
jsh@usenix.org (Jeffrey S. Haemer,) (10/12/90)
Submitted-by: jsh@usenix.org (Jeffrey S. Haemer,) An Update on UNIX1-Related Standards Activities October 11, 1990 USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee Jeffrey S. Haemer, jsh@ico.isc.com, Report Editor Summer-Quarter Standards Activities This editorial addresses some of the summer-quarter standards activi- ties covered by the USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee.2 In it, I've emphasized non-technical issues, which are unlikely to appear in offi- cial minutes and mailings of the standards committees. Previously published watchdog reports give more detailed, more technical sum- maries of these and other standards activities. If my comments move you to read one of those earlier reports that you wouldn't have read otherwise, I've done what I set out to do. Of course, on reading that report you may discover the watchdog's opinions differ completely from the ones you see here. As watchdog editor I edit the reports, I don't determine their contents. The opinions that follow, in contrast, are mine. Profiles There's an explosion of activity in the profiles world, bringing with it an explosion of problems, and dot zero, the POSIX guide group, is at ground zero.3 The first problem is, ``What's a profile?'' Everyone has a rough idea: it's a document that specifies an application- specific set of standards (or pieces of standards). The best informal illustration I've heard is from Michele Aden, of Sun Microsystems. Imagine, she says, you have to write a guideline for buying lamps for Acme Motors. You might require that the lamps have ANSI-standard, three-prong plugs, accept standard one-way, hundred-watt bulbs, have cords no shorter than five feet, and stand either two- to three-feet tall (desk models) or five- to seven-feet tall (floor-standing models). This combination of pointers to standards, additional specifications, and detailed options, which gives purchasing agents __________ 1. UNIXTM is a Registered Trademark of UNIX System Laboratories in the United States and other countries. 2. A companion article provides a general overview of the committee itself. 3. I use ``dot zero'' to refer both to the P1003.0 working group and to the document it's producing. These are common conversational conventions among standards goers, and which of the two I mean is usually obvious from context. October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 2 - guidelines to help them make choices without tying their hands to a specific vendor, is a profile - in this case, an Acme Motors lamp pro- file. Dot zero now sees itself as a group writing a guide to help profile writers pick their way through the Open-Systems'-standards maze. But that rough agreement is as far as things go. And the standards world is never informal. For ``profile'' to graduate from a hallway- conversation buzzword to an important organizing principle, it needs a precise definition. And since there are already four groups writing profiles - real-time, transaction processing, multiprocessing, and supercomputing - TCOS needs to figure out what a profile is pretty quickly. ISO already has IAPs, International Applications Profiles. The ISO document TR 10K describes these in detail. Unfortunately, TR 10K was developed for OSI-related profiles and shows it. Cut-down extracts of the standard appear in the document. Someone needs to define a PAP, a POSIX Application Profile. But that's just the first problem. Even thornier is the question ``What does it mean to say that something conforms to the POSIX transaction-processing profile?'' If I want to write assertions for a profile or tests to verify those assertions, how do I do it? Does it suffice to conform to the individual components? What about their interactions? The first principle of management is ``If it ain't somebody's job, it won't get done.'' Dot zero has done such a good job of promoting The Profile as an organizing principle for addressing standards issues that people are beginning to press dot zero for answers to questions like these. Unfortunately, that's a little like killing the messenger. It's just not dot zero's job. So the funda- mental profile question is ``Who's in charge?'' Right now, I think the question sits squarely, if uncomfortably, in the lap of the SEC - the Sponsors Executive Committee, which oversees the IEEE's operating-systems activities. In the meantime, the various working groups writing profiles are mak- ing headway by just trying to define profiles and seeing where they get stuck. Dot twelve, the real-time profile group, is busily making various sorts of tables, to try to find a reasonable way to specify the pieces that make up a profile, their options, and their interac- tions. Dot ten, the supercomputing profile group, is seeking an overall structure for a profile document that makes sense. Dot eleven, the transaction-processing profile group, is trying to steal from dots twelve and ten, an important test of the generality of the other two groups' solutions. Dot fourteen, the multiprocessing pro- file group, isn't far enough along to make theft worth their while, but will eventually provide a second generality test. Think of it as a problem in portable ideas. October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 3 - Will_I_Win_My_Beer? In my last editorial, I announced a beer bet with John Gertwagen over whether threads will ballot and pass before the base dot-four (real- time) ballot objections are resolved. I'm still betting on threads, but it looks like the bet is still anyone's to win. Some folks assure me that I'll win my beer handily, others say I don't have a chance. At the summer POSIX meetings, in Danvers, Massachusetts, the dot-four chair, Bill Corwin, challenged the threads folks to come up with a ballotable draft by the end of the week, and they very nearly did. (I hear complaints from some quarters that the the vote to go to ballot was 31 to 7 in favor, and that attempts to move to balloting were only blocked because of filibusters from those opposed.) On the other hand, technical reviewers are now resolving ballot objections to the base with machetes. They've thrown away asynchronous events alto- gether and have discarded real-time files and adopted the mmap model that the balloting group suggested.4 Dot four has moved from ``design by working committee'' to ``design by balloting committee.'' Innovation C.A.R. Hoare once said, ``One thing [the language designer] should not do is to include untried ideas of his own.'' We have followed that precept closely. The control flow statements of Ratfor are shamelessly stolen from the language C, developed for the UNIX operating system by D. M. Ritchie. - Kernighan and Plauger5 Should standards groups just standardize existing practice, or should they be solving known problems? And if they solve known problems, how much innovation is allowed? Shane McCarron's September UNIX/Review article6 uses the real-time group, dot four, as a focus for an essay on this subject. His thesis is that standards bodies should only be allowed to standardize what's boring. I've already seen John Gertwagen's reply, which I assume will be printed in the next issue. __________ 4. Dot four's real-time files are currently a part of the supercomputing profile. If they disappear from dot four, they may reappear elsewhere. 5. Kernighan, Brian and Peter Plauger, Software Tools, Addison- Wesley, 1979, p. 318. 6. McCarron, Shane, ``Commodities, Standards, and Real-Time Extensions,'' UNIX Review, 8(9):16-19 (1990). October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 4 - I find myself agreeing (and disagreeing) with both and recommend you read them. This battle will rage brighter in some of the groups less far along, but sporadic fighting still breaks out in the shell and tools group, dot two. Right now, collation and character classification are seeing a lot of skirmishing. Some want to stay relatively close to the existing practice, while others want to grow a mechanism to deal with the Pandora's box of internationalization. My favorite current exam- ple, though, is make. Bradford's augmented make is almost a decade old. Stu Feldman's original is a couple of years older than that. That decade has seen a number of good make replacements, some of them wildly successful: Glenn Fowler's nmake has virtually replaced make for large projects in parts of AT&T. Still, many of these upgrades maintain the original make model,7 just patching up some of make's more annoying craters and painting over its blemishes. At this point, there is real consensus among make augmentors about some patches. Most upgrades expand make's metarules. For example, .c.o: $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< might become %.c : %.o $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< Not much of a change, but it also gives us s.% : % $(GET) $(GFLAGS) -p $< > $> ... in place of the current, baroque __________ 7. Fowler, Glenn, ``A Case for make,'' Software-Practice and Experience, 20: S1/35-S1/46 (1990). October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 5 - .c~.o: $(GET) $GFLAGS) -p $< > $> ... Make's successors don't agree on syntax, but they all agree agree that ``~'' rules are the wrong solution to a real problem. Should dot two standardize a newer solution? Existing-practice dogmatists would say, ``No. It's not make.'' Here's a place I say, ``Yes - if we can do it in a way that doesn't break too many makefiles.'' The prohibition should be against untried ideas, and I don't see those here. A year or so ago, Stu Feldman (make), Glenn Fowler (nmake), Andrew Hume (mk), and a handful of other make luminaries presented a proposal to add four extensions to dot two's make. Not one is yet in the draft. I hope that changes. SCCT_Faces_Serious_Problem At Danvers, the testing group, dot three, worked with dot two on test assertions to try to avoid the kinds of problems created by the P1003.1 test assertions, which dot one had no input into until the assertions were in ballot. A side effect of the collaboration, which is taking place before dot two is finished, is that it may reveal that parts of dot two are imprecise enough to require a rewrite. Dot two, draft eight had around four-hundred ballot objections, draft nine saw fewer than half that number. There was hope that draft ten would halve that again, bringing it within striking distance of being a standard8 The asser- tion work may point out and clear up rough spots that might otherwise have escaped the notice of battle-fatigued balloters. (Paradoxically, NIST, which is heavily represented in dot three and painfully familiar with dot two's status and problems, is currently pushing for a shell- and-tools FIPS based on the now-out-of-date draft nine.) The exercise of trying to construct assertions for dot two before it goes to ballot may bring some new testing problems into focus, too. Before I explain what I mean, I'll give you a little background. The POSIX effort has outgrown dot three, which did test assertions for dot one and is in the process of constructing test assertions for dot two. Dot three has, at most, a couple of dozen members, and the docu- ment for dot two alone may swell to one- or two-thousand pages.9 If __________ 8. It didn't reach that goal. Keith Bostic tells me he submitted 132 objections himself. October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 6 - dot three were to continue to do all test assertion work, it would have to produce a similar document for at least a dozen other stan- dards. Reacting to this problem, the SEC created a steering committee, the SCCT, to oversee conformance testing. The committee's current plan is to help guide standards committees to write their own assertions, which will be part of the base document. Test assertions, like language independence, are about to become a standards requirement (a standards standard). With this change, the current process - write a base document, evolve the base document until it's done, write test assertions for the result, evolve the test assertions until they're done - would become: write a base document with test assertions, then evolve the base docu- ment modifying the test assertions as you go. A sensible-enough idea on the surface, but after the joint dot-two, dot-three meeting I have questions about how deep that sense runs. First, does it really make sense to write assertions early? Working- group members should be exposed to assertion writing early; when working-group members understand what a testable assertion is, it's easier to produce a testable document. Still, substantive, major draft revisions are normal, (see the real-time group's recent ballot, for example) and keeping test assertions up-to-date can be as much work as writing them from scratch. This meeting saw a lot of review of draft-nine-based assertions to see which ones had to change for draft ten. Second, if you make the assertions part of the standard, they're voted on in the same ballot. Are the same people who are qualified to vote on the technical contents qualified to vote on the test assertions? Third, writing good assertions is hard, and learning to write them takes time. How eager will people in working groups be to give up time they now spend writing and revising document content in order to do assertions? Fourth, is the time well-spent? Not everything merits the time and expense of a standard. If only a small number of organizations will ever develop test suites for a particular standard (with none being a ______________________________________________________________________ 9. Any imagined glamour of POSIX meetings fades rapidly when one is picking nits in a several-hundred-page standards document. When asked where the next meeting was, one attendee replied, ``some hotel with a bunch of meeting rooms with oversized chandeliers and little glasses full of hard candies on the tables.'' October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 7 - special, but important case) does it make sense for folks to spend time developing standards for those test suites? Wouldn't it make more sense to develop it after there is a clear need? (This is a per- verse variant of the ``existing practice'' doctrine. Even if you don't think standards should confine themselves to existing practice, does it make sense to innovate if there's never going to be an exist- ing practice?) Stay_Tuned_for_This_Important_Message If you haven't yet had the pleasure of internationalizing applica- tions, chances are you will soon. When you do, you'll face messaging: modifying the application to extract all text strings from external data files. The sun is setting on main() { printf("hello, world\n"); } and we're entering a long night of debugging programs like this: #include <stdio.h> #include <nl_types.h> #include "msg.h" /* decls of catname(), etc. */ #define GRTNG "hello, world\n" nl_catd catd; main() { setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); catd = catopen(catname(argv[0]), 0); printf(catgets(catd, SETID, MSGID, GRTNG)); catclose(catd); exit(0); } This, um, advance stems from a desire to let the program print ch`o c'c ^ng instead of hello, world when LANG is set to ``Vietnamese.'' October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 8 - Most programs use text strings, so the system services interface group, dot one, has been thinking about portable library calls to sup- ply such strings and portable formats for the files that contain them. Actually, ``re-thinking'' is probably more accurate than ``thinking about.'' 1003.1a Draft 9, specified a design by the UniForum Techni- cal Committee on Internationalization. At Danvers, X/Open counter- proposed a variant of its existing XPG3 specification, arguing that the X/Open scheme may have problems but it also has users, while the UniForum proposal is still in the laboratory. (It brings to mind the apocryphal story of Stu Feldman's wanting to improve the design of make, but feeling he couldn't because he already had seven users.) Someone from Unisys also brought a proposal, different from both UniForum's and X/Open's. That no one even showed up to defend the UniForum proposal shows that there is something wrong with standardizing messaging. One minute, there is enough support for a messaging scheme to get it into the draft standard; the next, there's none at all. In the end, the work- ing group agreed that a messaging standard was premature and that the free market should continue to operate in the area for a while. Given the relative sizes of the organizations concerned, this outcome probably sticks us with the X/Open scheme for a while, which I find the ugliest of the lot. Still, it's not a standard, and there's room for innovation and creativity if we're quick about it. The ``existing practice'' criterion is supposed to help avoid a requirement for mas- sive, murderous source code changes. We should be looking for the messaging scheme that doesn't require changes in the first place, not the one with the most existing victims. Language_Independence_Stalls_ISO_Progress Internationally, 1003.4 (real-time), 1003.5 (Ada bindings), and 1003.9 (FORTRAN bindings) are being held hostage by ISO, which refuses to loose them on the world until we come up with a language-independent binding for 1003.1. The question is, who will do the work? ``Not I,'' says dot four, whose travel vouchers are signed by companies caught up in the glamour of real-time and threads; ``Not I,'' say dot five and dot nine, who seldom have even ten working-group members apiece; ``Not I,'' say the tattered remnants of dot one, exhausted from struggling with 1003.1-1988, FIPS-151 and 151-1, and (almost) 1003.1-1990, before any other groups have even a first standard passed. Where is the Little Red Hen when we need her? Should_We_Ballot_POSIX_the_Way_We_Ballot_Three-Phase_Power? In the meantime, we progress inexorably toward balloting on several IEEE/ANSI standards. The sizes of the drafts (and several contribu- tors to comp.std.unix) raise real questions about whether the IEEE's balloting process make sense for the sort of standards work POSIX is October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 9 - performing. A month or so might be enough to review a few-page hardware standard. But is it enough for the nearly 800 pages in the latest recirculation of dot two? Does it really make sense to review the standard for grep in hard copy? Many would like to see longer balloting times and on-line access to drafts. Some argue that the final standard should be available only from the IEEE, both to insure authenticity and to provide the IEEE with income from its standards efforts; even that argument seems weak. Checksums can guarantee authenticity, and AT&T's Toolchest proves that electronic distribution works: I'll bet ksh has paid for itself several times over. ``We_handed_1201.1_its_head_and_asked_it_to_comb_its_hair.'' Moving away from POSIX, we come upon 1201.1, still in search of an officially sanctioned mission that the group wants to take on. The group currently has a PAR (charter) to standardize various aspects of X-based windowing - principally the toolkit-level API - but any hope of compromise between the OPEN LOOK and OSF/Motif factions died at the winter-quarter Utah meetings. In a moment of responsible, adult behavior, the group recovered by switching to a dark horse: a window-system-independent API that could be implemented on top of either product. Marc Rochkind's XVT, which already allows users to write programs that are portable across several, unrelated window sys- tems including X, the Mac, and MS-Windows, was offered as a proof-of- concept. While the original charter could probably encompass the new XVT work, the group seemed to feel that this direction change, together with the fragmenting of the original group into separate toolkit, drivability, UIMS, and X intrinsics efforts, required that they ask the SEC for a new charter. (The drivability group has already had a separate PAR approved and is now 1201.2.) The group convened a pair of interim meetings in Milpitas, California, and Boulder, Colorado, to forge a PAR that would meet the SEC's new, stricter standards for PAR approval by the summer Danvers meeting. They didn't succeed. Most of the problems seem to have been administrative missteps. Some examples: - Working-group members complained that the Milpitas meeting took place without enough notice for everyone to attend, and issues that had been resolved at the interim meetings were re-opened in Danvers. - The PAR was so broadly written that at least one technology (Ser- pent) was advanced as a candidate that almost no one thought should even be considered. - Some working-group members hadn't even received copies of the XVT reference manual before they reached Danvers. October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities - 10 - - Many SEC members appeared not to have seen a copy of the PAR until the afternoon before the SEC meeting, and some saw the final PAR for the first time at the SEC meeting itself. Many people who weren't familiar with the proposal ended up uneasy about it, not because they'd read it and didn't like it - they'd not been given much chance to read it - but because a lack of attention to administrative details in the proposal's presentation sapped their confidence in the group's ability to produce a sound standard. After all, standards work is detail work. In the end, the SEC tactfully thanked the group and asked them to try again. One SEC member said, ``We handed 1201.1 its head and asked it to comb its hair.'' I believe all of this is just inexperience, not a symptom of fundamen- tal flaws in the group or its approach. If 1201.1 can enlist a few standards lawyers - POSIX has no shortage of people who know how to dot all the i's and cross all the t's - and can muster the patience to try to move its PAR through methodically and carefully, I think the group will give us a standard that will advance our industry. If it doesn't do so soon, though, the SEC will stop giving it its head back. POSIX_Takes_to_the_Slopes Finally, I want to plug the Weirdnix contest. We currently have a great prize- including a ski trip to Utah - and only a few entries.10 The contest closes November 21, 1990. Send your entries to me, jsh@ico.isc.com. __________ 10. The occasionally heard suggestion that Brian Watkins was found clutching Mitch Wagner's entry is tasteless; it is almost - but, luckily, not quite - beneath me to repeat it. October 11, 1990 Standards Update Recent Standards Activities Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 198