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- Submitted-by: rja7m@chaos.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson)
-
- As a former Federal employee and someone who looks at POSIX
- strictly from the user point of view, I'd much rather see NIST
- write a FIPS based on P1003.2/10 AND the current P1003.2a than
- to have them write one based on P1003.2/9 because it seems clear
- that draft 9 will be farther from the end product than draft 10
- will be by a significant margin and P1003.2a has a lot of stuff
- that most existing UNIX (tm) users expect to see that was omitted
- from P1003.2. For that matter, it might be worth looking at the
- SVID for System V, Release 4 and the BSD 4.3 Tahoe documentation
- to see if there is other stuff that isn't part of the P1003.2
- effort that NIST thinks government users need. For my part,
- I want P1003.2 to specify an environment with capabilties
- comparable to what BSD and the SVID both specify and I don't
- really see that just now in the drafts.
-
- I have mixed feelings about the notion of NIST pushing the FIPS this fast,
- but I agree that some vendors are clearly just trying to drag out the
- IEEE standards process and are trying to water down the standard so
- that their existing proprietary system will meet the standard.
-
- Randall Atkinson
- randall@Virginia.EDU
-
- Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 149
-
-