std-unix@longway.TIC.COM (Moderator, John S. Quarterman) (11/10/88)
From: uunet!unisoft!hlj (Hal Jespersen)
P1003.2 Working Group Status Report--October 1988
Hal Jespersen
UniSoft Corporation
November 6, 1988
The P1003.2 POSIX Shell and Utilities Working Group met in
Honolulu, Hawaii, October 24 through 28, 1988.
The following were the highlights of the meeting:
1. The P1003.2 Technical Editor, Maggie Lee, of Amdahl
Corporation, resigned her position because of workload
conflicts. Maggie served in this position since April
1987 and the Working Group expressed their sincere
thanks for all the outstanding work she did on Drafts
3 through 7. Hal Jespersen will assume these duties
as editor until a suitable replacement can be found.
An arrangement of chapter editors feeding materials
into an overall draft editor may be attempted.
2. The results of the ``mock ballot'' against Draft 7
were processed almost the entire week. The Working
Group did an outstanding job of submitting objections-
--over 1400--on a very tight schedule; they repeated
the feat by resolving almost all of them during the
week. As a result, Draft 8 will be a draft of
considerably higher quality and will be a good start
for the formal balloting process.
3. A schedule for balloting was discussed. The balloting
group for 1003.2 closes in early November; the exact
date is unknown (but it is probably before you're
reading this report). Draft 8 will be targeted for
completion of editing December 5, 1988, although the
exceptionally high volume of changes may delay this
until the 12th. Assuming that the IEEE office
receives it in mid-December, a balloting period of
January 1 through February 15, 1989 is probable.
Considering the experiences of P1003.1, it is very
likely that final approval will not be reached before
December, 1989, for approval at the January, 1990,
Standards Board meeting.
4. Some of the significant changes to appear in Draft 8:
a. A new Chapter 7 was accepted, based on software
for application installation developed by
Digital Equipment Corp.
P1003.2 Status Report 10/88 2
b. The chapters will be rearranged slightly.
Chapter 3 (Environment) will be merged into 2
(Definitions). The C language bias of Draft 7
will be negated by establishing a new language-
independent bindings chapter (just stubs for
now). The C language bindings will appear in a
separate chapter, clearly marked as destined for
removal in a future draft, after a separate C
bindings working group is established. (At the
meeting, it was discussed putting them into a
``normative appendix,'' but I have since found
out that that isn't normal IEEE procedure, so
they'll have to be in real chapters to stay in
the standard.) A decision was made to not
include an empty chapter for Ada bindings, as an
active working group is already in progress for
Ada, so that chapter has a home of its own in
their standard. Separate chapters for C and
FORTRAN development tools will point back to a
new language-independent compiler-linker
section.
c. The egrep and fgrep commands have been merged
into a single new grep.
d. The xform command was removed as unnecessary.
e. The UUCP-oriented commands were moved to an
appendix, awaiting balloting group direction for
inclusion in the standard.
f. Major surgery was performed on the hd command,
which was also renamed xd, to avoid collisions
with vendor commands.
g. The strip command was added to the Software
Development chapter.
5. A draft PAR for a ``User Portability Extension'' (UPE)
was discussed. This supplement to 1003.2 is intended
to provide many of the familiar interactive UNIX
utilities, such as full screen editors, omitted from
the original P1003.2 scope. It will promote user
portability, but there are two caveats: users are
limited to being traditional time-sharing UNIX users,
such as program developers, and; the terminals
supported are limited to asynchronous character-mode
terminals, such as VT100's. Advanced work into
windows or mouse-based systems is specifically
excluded. The Working Group will spend the majority
of 1989 on this extension. The PAR will be submitted
P1003.2 Status Report 10/88 3
in late November, 1988.
6. The NIST (formerly NBS) confirmed plans to issue a
POSIX Shell and Tools FIPS based on Draft 8 in
December. They are planning on accepting the entire
draft with the exception of some of the
internationalization features and the nascent
application installation material; and, the software
development options will remain optional.
The next meeting is scheduled for January 9 - 12, 1989, in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Embassy Suites Hotel, 1000 SE
17th Street. (305) 527-7000; specify group rate for ``IEEE
P1003 meeting.) Since the balloting against Draft 8 will
still be in its early stages, this is an abbreviated meeting
that will concentrate almost entirely on the new UPE
supplement. January 9 - 11 is for the full Working Group;
January 12 is reserved for balloting coordination by the
technical reviewers.
Subsequent meetings:
April 24 - 28, 1989 St Paul, Minnesota.
July 10 - 14, 1989 San Francisco, California.
October 16 - 20, 1989 Brussels, Belgium.
Hal Jespersen, Chair P1003.2
UniSoft Corp
6121 Hollis Street
Emeryville, CA 94608-2092
(415) 420-6410, ext 448
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