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- Path: longway!std-unix
- From: std-unix@longway.TIC.COM (Moderator, John S. Quarterman)
- Newsgroups: comp.std.unix
- Subject: status report
- Message-ID: <261@longway.TIC.COM>
- Date: 9 Nov 88 18:47:06 GMT
- Reply-To: uunet!unisoft!hlj (Hal Jespersen)
- Organization: UniSoft Corp. R&D, 6121 Hollis St, Emeryville, CA 94608
- Lines: 149
- Approved: jsq@longway.tic.com (Moderator, John S. Quarterman)
-
- 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
- {uunet,amdahl,sun}!unisoft!hlj
-
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